The Rural School and the Rural Teacher: Productive Russian and International Practices
The comparative analysis of Russian and foreign theory and practice aims at identifying productive practices of modern rural schools, professional training and development of rural teachers. Since the sociocultural, deficiency and ambivalent approaches are determined as basic for this study, their verification allows for a constructive balance in the development of rural schools and teachers as well as for positive changes in the sociocultural educational situation in rural settlements. The comparative analysis is based on theoretical and empirical studies from different countries of the world. The authors draw on the data and analytics of large-scale international studies, results of foreign and Russian researches, international documents of educational management, statistics and media information. They also rely on their long-term experience of teaching and organizing continuous professional training for rural teachers. A rural school teacher's activity is considered as professional, determined by the specificity of the sociocultural educational situation with its differentiation, inconsistency and instability, as well by the characteristics of modern rural schools, including their social mission, multifunctionality, openness, instability/variability of its position, the latter brought about by the increasing paucity of rural school students. These factors directly determine the specificity of teaching in rural areas: educators have to teach multiple subjects and fulfill multiple functions; they are involved in local community life and often have to changes the type of their professional activity. The chain of interrelated problems in the professional activity of rural teachers is considered within the framework of their integral, professionally-oriented development. The productive Russian and foreign practices of mixed-age teaching in rural schools are underpinned by the idea of relations in mixed-age child and child-adult communities as a system-forming factor in the modern information society. The authors determine and give grounds for the following priorities in modernization of the rural school and rural teacher training: formation and development of rural schools as sociocultural educational centers of settlements; establishment of federal and regional network educational centers to promote and support mixed-age child-adult educational communities that would function as a tool for solving vital problems of local communities and rural development; mixed-age education as a productive educational technology in small rural school; personalized training for rural teachers. The study can be useful for teachers, school administrators, researchers of lifelong education for rural teachers, and pedagogical students.