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This research seeks to explore the potential of Lesson Study as a vehicle to support professional development (PD) in a rural, Irish primary school. Lesson Study was utilised to design and implement integrated STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) lessons with young children (ages 4–7 years).

Three teachers were introduced to and participated in four cycles of Lesson Study over the course of one school year. Qualitative data were generated from interviews, collaborative weekly meetings and observation sheets.

Analysis suggests that Lesson Study supported the development of a culture of collaboration and provided an opportunity for teachers to share their knowledge. Findings also reveal that Lesson Study motivated teachers to reflect on their role within the classroom and enabled them to move away from teacher-led approaches. Although teachers perceived Lesson Study to be a beneficial form of PD, factors constrained their engagement, including practical, cultural and sustainability challenges.

The study explores the adaptability of Lesson Study in first level education in the context of STEM education. It reveals teachers’ first experience of Lesson Study, given its stark contrast to more “traditional” PD experiences they are accustomed to. This article will, therefore, be of interest to teachers, school leaders and policy makers.

This paper contributes initial findings to a currently under-researched area, Lesson Study in a rural context. This study also combines Lesson Study with STEM education, which has not been widely explored.

The authors are developing a model for rural science teacher professional development, building teacher expertise and collaboration and creating high-quality science lessons: technology-mediated lesson study (TMLS).

TMLS provided the means for geographically distributed teachers to collaborate, develop, implement and improve lessons. TMLS uses technology to capture lesson implementation and collaborate on lesson iterations.

This paper describes the seven steps of the TMLS process with examples, showing how teachers develop their content and pedagogical knowledge while building relationships.

The TMLS approach provides an innovative option for teachers to collaborate across distances and form strong, lasting relationships with others.

Private supplementary tutoring, common in many countries, has mixed (both positive and negative) dimensions that impact student learning. Private supplementary tutoring runs parallel to mainstream schooling and provides lessons before or after school hours in exchange for additional fees. The purpose of this paper is to focus on how private supplementary tutoring benefits students’ learning in secondary education. It also identifies the drawbacks of tutoring, and shows variations in and between urban and rural locations.

The paper employed a mixed methods approach using a survey and individual interview collected from two different research settings: urban and rural. Grades 8 and 10 were purposefully chosen for data collection. A sample of 802 participants, including 401 students and their 401 parents (either mothers or fathers), participated in the survey, in addition to 48 interviewees comprising students, parents and teachers.

At times, pupils’ educational perspectives are influenced by the conflicting (positive/negative) standpoints of tutoring issues. The paper finds mixed impacts of private tutoring with a focus on disparities of implications between urban and rural locations. It identifies positive aspects such as learning attainment, exam preparation, relationship growth and lesson practice, as well as negative perspectives, such as an examination-centered aim and hamper of mainstream school learning.

The study contributes to the awareness of private supplementary tutoring that benefits students’ learning while also bringing disadvantages. It shows implications of fee-charging tutoring which may relate to students’ family socio-economic situations. The paper addresses private tutoring in general (including English and all other subjects) in most cases, and, more specifically, private tutoring in English as a subject in some cases.

Our purpose is to examine the outcomes of using video as a reflection tool in peer-to-peer coaching with rural teachers as part of a literacy coaching professional development project.

This qualitative case study presents findings from a professional development project serving rural educators interested in becoming literacy coaches. Using a peer coaching model, literacy coaching participants video recorded two literacy coaching cycles capturing pre-conferencing, lesson modeling, and post-conferencing. Reflection was facilitated through face-to-face discussion and online technologies (discussion forums and e-mail).

Face-to-face sessions were integral in fostering participant reflection. Technology challenges impacted the extent to which participants engaged in and valued video as a reflection tool. Participants repurposed video reflection for self-identified professional and pedagogical purposes.

Video reflection can be used as a part of multimodal set of tools to collaborate with teachers. Face-to-face interaction is important in supporting rural teachers’ use of video reflection. Teacher educators generally need more on-site authentic involvement to gain emic perspectives when working with the rural sites in order for the video tasks to be more effective and meaningful for the teachers. Repurposing video reflection can be an expression of agency in meeting teacher needs.

As academic fields increasingly turn to social action and seek partnerships with groups beyond the academy, so too are we looking for guidance. Rural sociology developed out of applying research to social action and within this field was a unique unit. The purpose of this paper is to present a history of the Division of Farm Population and Rural Life, which was part of the US Department of Agriculture from 1919 to 1953 was a pioneer in applying sociological knowledge to policy and action.

This article looks back to the history of this unit to examine the lessons to be learned.

Placing these lessons within the context of contemporary issues underscores the continuing relevance of this historical experience.

The issues surrounding engaging external partners are both particularistic and universal. However, without an historical sense of the challenges, each time we encounter them, the challenges feel new and somehow unique. This article looks back to history to examine lessons that can be learned. Placing these lessons within the context of contemporary issues underscores relevance of the historical experience from events and people that occurred several generations of professionals ago.

As interventions are disseminated widely, issues of fidelity and adaptation become increasingly critical to understand. This study aims to describe the types of adaptations made by teachers delivering a school‐based substance use prevention curriculum and their reasons for adapting program content.

To determine the degree to which implementers adhere to a prevention curriculum, naturally adapt the curriculum, and the reasons implementers give for making adaptations, the study examined lesson adaptations made by the 31 teachers who implemented the keepin’ it REAL drug prevention curriculum in 7th grade classrooms (n=25 schools). Data were collected from teacher self‐reports after each lesson and observer coding of videotaped lessons. From the total sample, 276 lesson videos were randomly selected for observational analysis.

Teachers self‐reported adapting more than 68 percent of prevention lessons, while independent observers reported more than 97 percent of the observed lessons were adapted in some way. Types of adaptations included: altering the delivery of the lesson by revising the delivery timetable or delivery context; changing content of the lesson by removing, partially covering, revising, or adding content; and altering the designated format of the lesson (such as assigning small group activities to students as individual work). Reasons for adaptation included responding to constraints (time, institutional, personal, and technical), and responding to student needs (students’ abilities to process curriculum content, to enhance student engagement with material).

The study sample was limited to rural schools in the US mid‐Atlantic; however, the results suggest that if programs are to be effectively implemented, program developers need a better understanding of the types of adaptations and reasons implementers provide for adapting curricula.

These descriptive data suggest that prevention curricula be developed in shorter teaching modules, developers reconsider the usefulness of homework, and implementer training and ongoing support might benefit from more attention to different implementation styles.

With nearly half of US public schools implementing some form of evidence‐based substance use prevention program, issues of implementation fidelity and adaptation have become paramount in the field of prevention. The findings from this study reveal the complexity of the types of adaptations teachers make naturally in the classroom to evidence‐based curricula and provide reasons for these adaptations. This information should prove useful for prevention researchers, program developers, and health educators alike.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the lessons that could be learnt from the first year of implementing the Wholesale and Retail Sector Education and Training Authority’s Rural Development Programme.

This exploratory, qualitative study involved unemployed people from a rural location in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa. A focus group and in-depth interviews were held with the current learners, the programme manager, the skills training providers, and the royal custodian of the locality.

While highlighting the factors that enhance success as well as those that impede development, the study found that the learnership contributed significantly to social transformation through rural entrepreneurship. It empowers disadvantaged women and youths to gain access and skills which, if the recommended measures to sustain the programme are implemented, could enable them to grow bigger businesses.

Since this was an exploratory, qualitative study, the limitations of a small, convenience sample need to be overcome by a larger, quantitative study, and a more complete collection of accurate secondary data.

Despite the obvious limitations, this study has contributed to the literature on both rural entrepreneurship and transformation in South Africa. Both are under-researched topics, despite transformation being a socio-political imperative and entrepreneurship, especially in rural areas, being a key to overcoming South Africa’s high unemployment rate.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how rural teachers provided a PLC by leveraging virtual technologies to connect educators of like subject disciplines from several schools, foreign and domestic.

A phenomenological case study-based approach was leveraged to investigate established vPLCs at schools (Creswell, 2013; Stake, 2010). Qualitative data were collected from multiple sources to obtain rural teacher perceptions on the impact vPLCs had on their practice (Creswell, 2013).

Teacher collaborative teams build relationships comparable to teams that met face to face as part of a similar PLC and PD experience. Participant reflections in this investigation showed that rural educators favored face-to-face meetings; however, vPLCs provided similar teacher experiences to that of the face-to-face PBL model. Results indicated that educators recognized virtual collaboration just as valuable a tool for enabling PLCs than face-to-face collaborations while still offering similarities to improved teacher practice.

The research was limited to teachers in rural settings in the USA (Texas) and in the Dominican Republic. The research was limited to teacher perceptions of change, and observed changes as part of their participation in a research-based virtual PLC model. The research was limited to the school setting over an academic year.

The findings from this study have practical implications for rural teachers and school implementation of a professional learning community model.

The promise provided by this study is that vPLCs may provide opportunity for rural schools to provide a job-embedded professional development model (Croft et al., 2010) for otherwise isolated teachers (Barrett et al., 2015).

This paper aims to provide new insights into and offer potential solutions to the challenges encountered by mental health services working with remote, rural or underserved communities in the UK.

In this paper, the authors reflect on the utility of integrating conventional clinical approaches, with preventive care and empowering work within the community, to provide culturally sensitive and accessible mental health services. The authors describe an example of community intervention from a mental health service in Ghana designed to enhance reach within remote and rural communities and identify potential lessons for practice in the UK.

The partnership between community mental health services and the rural communities, including families and existing social frameworks, applies collaborative care to overcome the lack of resources and facilitate the acceptability of mental health services to the local population. There are a series of important lessons from this experience including the importance of understanding the culture of a community to optimise reach and the importance of working IN the community and WITH the community.

This paper is novel because it provides learning from a model of care applied in the global south that has potential for implementation with underserved populations in the UK. The authors suggest a reframing of the notion of community care to encompass existing frameworks of community, not merely a biomedical conceptualisation.

The relationship between women and land is not a mere legal or technical relationship but one that is mediated through socio-cultural norms and notions. Building on the work of Feminism Environmentalism, but moving beyond Agarwal’s materialist system, this paper aims to assess the level of change (if any) in the perceptions and practices of rural communities in Sohag and Assiut toward women’s ownership and inheritance of land post the implementation of some societal initiatives by feminist organizations and what this means for rural development in these communities. In doing this, the paper explores the strengths and weaknesses of these societal initiatives.

The paper uses case study approach by focusing on societal initiatives in two Egyptian Governorates. It also follows a mixed-methods sequential explanatory design, whereby quantitative data is first driven by using a survey that assesses the level of change in the societal perceptions and practices toward women’s ownership of agricultural land and its implication for rural development. Quantitative data is then followed by qualitative methods, namely, eight focus group discussions with different societal groups, to have a more in-depth understanding and explanation of the occurring change (if any).

The research finds that a positive shift occurred in the societal perceptions and practices with regard to women’s ownership and inheritance of agricultural land as a result of the societal initiatives. This, in turn, had better implications for rural development in terms of improved socio-economic well-being and overall quality of life. This improvement can be traced back to the change in cultural notions and perceptions as a result of four factors: capitalizing on the roles of influential groups, relying on influential activities, targeting men, especially heads of households or elders, and building blocks or partnering with the various relevant entities.

The misperception of the nature of the women-–environment/land relationship and its confinement to legal solutions undermines the likelihood of improving this relationship and, subsequently, attainment of rural and sustainable development. This study provides some key lessons to improve the women–environment/land relationship and, in turn, enhance the chances for rural and sustainable development through addressing the underlying socio-cultural barriers.

In Egypt, socio-cultural barriers hamper women’s ownership of agricultural land leading to only 5% of agriculture land being owned by women compared to 95% owned by men; a situation that is found in many other countries, such as Kenya, where women perform 70% of the agricultural labor, but possess less than 1% of the agricultural land. Improving women’s access to land, hence, solves a common social problem in Egypt and Africa and enhances gender equality.

Little work has been done to investigate the socio-cultural dimensions to the women–environment relationship. Hence, this study fills this gap and concludes with some lessons learned on how to improve the women–environment, particularly land, relationship.