This paper explores some of the political and methodological challenges involved in researching rural education. It begins by outlining the situation in Australia regarding the relationship between social justice and rural education. It first describes the disadvantages experienced by many rural communities and presents an analysis of rural educational achievement in Australia. The paper then argues the limitations of traditional and established notions of social justice and, in this context, presents Soja’s proposal that spatiality is a third way of understanding the world. The paper is organized and informed by the principle that what matters, first and foremost, is the nature of the research problem, with decisions about methodology following, and shaped accordingly.

The staffing of rural, remote and isolated schools remains a significant issue of concern in Australian education.  In this paper we provide a comprehensive account of the Australian research related to the staffing of rural schools post 2004.  The review identifies the overarching themes of the opportunities and challenges of staffing rural schools, pre-service teacher preparation, and leadership. Within these there are numerous sub categories such as the policy setting, incentives, understanding place, mentoring, professional development, and teacher education.  Overall the review identifies that the issues explored in the research literature between 2004 and 2016 are similar in character to those examined prior to 2004.  As such we raise the question of, if we have such a well-developed knowledge of matters related to rural school staffing, why does it remain an ongoing issue? While this review does not seek to answer this question, it provides an opening for discussion by identifying and describing the research on issues, and approaches, in the staffing of rural, remote, and isolated schools to date.

In this article we investigate the generative causes of variation in the professional identity of new teachers. Building on previous work that has shown a link between professional identity and socio-political context, we argue that the context experienced in late adolescence and early adulthood is particularly significant in shaping how beginning teachers think of themselves as teachers. This finding suggests that the linear response to neoliberal education reform described in much of the critical literature may be too simple to account for the range of ways teachers interact with the system. There is, therefore, a need for greater diversity in research approaches to work with the complexity of social systems in and around schools. To support this call for methodological diversity, we borrow the life story model of identity as a theoretical framework and use a computer-assisted phenomenographic analysis technique to find new ways into the research data.Keywords: teacher professional identity; life story model of identity; neoliberal reform; computer-assisted qualitative research Arguments that effective school reform requires an understanding of the complex ways teachers interact with the drivers of change has been present in the school change literature for over a decade (see for example Bascia & Hargreaves, 2000;Sarason, 1996). These interactions are shaped by the dominant and popular discourses of teacher's work which critical scholars including Connell (2009) andMoore (2004) have shown are shaped by the broader social and political setting, including the persistent government reforms of education over the last 20 years or so across the globe. Such work illuminates the connected evolution of popular discourses, the contexts within which reform takes place, and the identity of teachers, reflecting

While preparation for professional practice is conceived as placeless, it is enacted in place. Consequently, many professionals find themselves working in conditions significantly different than those they were educated in and for. This is especially relevant for new professionals arriving in rural settings after preparation in urban programs, where metrocentric models of orientation to practice are implicitly privileged. The consequent dis‐join between practice and place often results in new professionals feeling ‘out of place’ and questioning their professional competence. It also results in settings outside the metrocentric norm being viewed as less desirable practice contexts. Negative desirability hinders professional recruitment, while feeling out of place and incompetent hinders professional retention; both are longstanding issues in rural communities. Recent developments in professional education and practice standards emphasise adaptability to practise in specific contexts. However, ‘context,’ a primary focus to date for rural preparation is presented as a largely static backdrop that needs to be accommodated to engage in the ‘real practice’ one was trained for. Drawing on the spatial turn in social theory, we argue that place both shapes and is shaped by professionals and their practices and as such, must be engaged with deeply and dynamically. This conceptualisation of the relationship between place and practice has critical implications for professional preparation. As interdisciplinary practitioners and researchers working in diverse contexts, we examine ‘place’ from a social constructivist perspective as a focal point for professional preparation.

The field of rural education has consistently demonstrated that spatial disadvantage has material dimensions related to distance from urban nerve centres that contain services. In turn, distance from urban services entwines with multiple dimensions of social privilege and disadvantage to create specific, more or less place-based, rural, regional and remote cultural geographies. This is a problem that has historically been addressed in a number of ways, including distance-mitigation incentives to a range of system actors such as teachers, principals, students, and parents.  In Tasmania, an island state to the south of the mainland Australian continent, the idea that young people have a right to a reasonably accessible, nationally and internationally normative education in their own communities, has only relatively recently been accepted.  There is now a persistent, indeed insistent, multi-sectoral call for cultural change in Tasmanian regarding access to education.  At this writing the state government has committed to extending all high schools which are defined as years 7-10 facilities, to offer years 11 and 12 programming by 2022 (Street, 2017).  Some of this discourse responds to the positioning of Tasmania itself as a ‘wicked problem’ (West, 2013; Cranston et al, 2014).  Notably, this discourse related to rural Tasmania echoes similar thinking about social and economic development in advanced capitalist societies around the world.Â