Infrastructural solidarity and informal continuing education: social purpose and critical equity in rural Indonesian teacher learning

Participation in lifelong learning is increasingly expected across contemporary societies; institutional provision, however, routinely fails practitioners in under-resourced, geographically isolated, and non-Western contexts. This study investigates how early childhood teachers in rural Indonesia construct informal continuing education through mobile-mediated communities embedded within structured professional development programmes, and what their practices reveal about the social purposes and equity dimensions of lifelong learning. A 33-month digital ethnography across three groups in Pamekasan District, East Java, yielded approximately 3,000 messages, 78 screenshots, continuous fieldnotes, and interviews with 12 purposively sampled teachers. Thematic analysis identified four themes: distributed leadership enacted through an ethics of accompaniment; collective inquiry grounded in Islamic spiritual meaning-making; shared vision realised through cascading knowledge dissemination; and supportive relationships acknowledging multidimensional isolation. Critical analysis exposes structural contradictions: accompaniment depends on women’s uncompensated affective labour, spiritual framing risks depoliticising structural critique, and digital inclusion generates new exclusions among the unconnected. The findings advance three conceptual contributions: infrastructural solidarity as an equity lens; Islamic epistemology as a foundational basis for adult learning community; and a reconceptualisation of engagement that foregrounds material infrastructure prior to the motivational variables conventional models examine, inviting the field to reconsider secular, individually-oriented frameworks for communally organised adult learning.