Researching rural-regional (teacher) education in Australia

In 2007 a group of researchers from four Australian universities was awarded an ARC Discovery grant to undertake a longitudinal study into the nature of successful teacher education strategies aimed at making rural teaching an attractive long-term career option. This paper presents descriptive insights into how the research team, located in three Australian states (New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia) is able to maintain a sustained cohesive approach to achieving the project's aim. The initial section of the paper introduces each team member prior to discussing the importance of taking a national perspective on rural education. The second section considers the research design and shows how the main objective of the investigation will be achieved. Emerging trends from the quantitative and qualitative data collected in 2008 are revealed in the third section. The discussion in the fourth section centres on how the trends emerging from the collected data requires a reconceptualisation of preparing pre-service teachers for non-metropolitan placements. In doing so, the project's emerging conceptual framework, which emphasizes that preparation of teachers for rural and regional appointments needs to be considered beyond the terms and forms of traditional professional practice, is explored. [Author abstract, ed