Enacting aspirational rural schooling towards sustainable futures: exploring students’ ethnographic imaginations implications for place-based pedagogy

ABSTRACT Place-based pedagogy (PBP) has become an emerging strategy for improving educational relevance for low-income communities. This article investigates children's learning aspirations to motivate broader theoretical discussion about opportunities for enacting PBP for rural schooling success in Ghana. Using an ethnographic case study design, collaboration with a rural school supported data collection on children's home cultural capital shaping teachers’ pedagogy. Using PBP theorisations, thematic analysis of qualitative data found rural students’ aspirations were less diversified and heavily shaped by their immediate environment. The article concludes that inspiring higher aspirations in the rural children researched would require geographically sensitive teachers who stretch their learners’ inculcated images about their community into global opportunities. The article proposes integration of Ghanaian rural indigenous place-sensitive, apprenticeship-based, collectivist learning approaches and traditionally valued skills, through PBP, as a key re-positioning strategy to improve educational outcomes for Ghanaian rural children through greater harnessing of home cultural capital.