Teachers’ territorialities. An expanded definition of teachers’ professional practice in rural education

Teachers’ territorialities encompass the claim that teachers’ practices do not necessarily have to be perceived as bounded to classroom teaching but can be understood as a way to reconnect with the importance of space in education. In the relationship with school contexts, teachers can be situated within a network of social and spatial relations that provides meaning to teaching but it can also be shaped by teachers. Territoriality becomes a powerful conceptualisation to consider how transformative teachers’ practices can be, particularly in its form as a spatial practice. Territoriality and the territory that it generates involves a spatial relationship that, in its South American understanding, focuses on the creation, appropriation and ownership of spaces. I have explored these issues from a qualitative and interpretative perspective using a multi-site case study as research strategy to generate in-depth descriptions of in-service rural teachers’ practices in Chile’s Cachapoal province. Findings in this context have identified different processes that contribute to defining the spaces of professional practice in which rural teachers can deploy their expertise, particularly in contexts of accountability, where administrative and examination requirements seem to have disabled action rather than enabled it. Previous studies have highlighted how teachers react in these contexts with practices of resistance and compliance; however, the examination of teachers’ territoriality in the cases studied has indicated how teachers might act in professional spaces that they have made their own or have purposefully created as part of their practice in schools. The significance of these findings has been to demonstrate how teachers can achieve an agentic role as they can transform school contexts into school-based territories that can be spatially diverse and encompass divergent types of knowledge. Territoriality, therefore, can be applied to other settings rather than the rural and to different professions and occupations