New teachers learning in rural and regional Australia

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New teachers learning in rural andregional AustraliaMargaret Somerville a , Margaret Plunkett a & Michael Dyson aa Faculty of Education , Monash University , Churchill, AustraliaPublished online: 14 Jan 2010.

To cite this article: Margaret Somerville , Margaret Plunkett & Michael Dyson (2010) New teacherslearning in rural and regional Australia, Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 38:1, 39-55, DOI:10.1080/13598660903474130

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Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher EducationVol. 38, No. 1, February 2010, 39–55

ISSN 1359-866X print/ISSN 1469-2945 online© 2010 Australian Teacher Education AssociationDOI: 10.1080/13598660903474130http://www.informaworld.com

CAPJ1359-866X1469-2945Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 38, No. 1, Dec 2009: pp. 0–0Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher EducationNew teachers learning in rural and regional AustraliaAsia-Pacific Journal of Teacher EducationM. Somerville et al.Margaret Somerville, * Margaret Plunkett and Michael Dyson

Faculty of Education, Monash University, Churchill, Australia

(Received 10 December 2008; final version received 5 October 2009)

This paper reports on a longitudinal ethnographic study of beginning primary schoolteachers in rural and regional Victoria, Australia. The study uses a conceptual frame-work of place and workplace learning to ask: How do new teachers learn to do theirwork and how do they learn about the places and communities in which they beginteaching? In this paper, we focus on data from the first year of the three-year longitudi-nal study, using a place-based survey and ethnographic interviews. We found that thespace of the classroom was the dominant site of learning to become a teacher for thenew teachers in this study. This learning was understood through the discourse ofclassroom management. Analysis of these storylines reveals the ways in which thecommunity and classroom are not separate but intertwined, and the process of learningabout their communities began through the children in their classes.

Keywords: beginning teachers; classroom management; place pedagogies; rural andregional; workplace learning

IntroductionThis paper analyses the data from the first stage of a longitudinal study that foregrounds thecategory of ‘place’ to ask: How do new teachers in rural and regional communities learn todo their work and how do they learn about the places and communities in which they beginteaching? It follows on from a five-year longitudinal study of a single teacher in westernNew South Wales (NSW) in a school with a history of very high staff turnover. In the firstyear, this new teacher discussed his intense struggle to come to terms with the communities,the children and the place in which he began teaching. He intended to leave at the end of thefirst year (Somerville, 2006b). By scaffolding this new teacher’s learning with an approachbased on place and community, he continued to grow as a teacher and to develop new placeresponsive pedagogies. He remains in the school five years later, now as a Head Teacher.

Our current longitudinal study of primary school teachers in rural and regional Victoriais following teachers over the first three years of beginning teaching (2007–09). Thispaper focuses only on the outcomes of a survey and interviews conducted during their firstyear. This involved the return of 33 of 80 surveys, and the analysis of ten semi-structuredinterviews. We consider, however, that the larger contextual details from the overall studyare important because each part of the study needs to be understood in the context of thewhole. This is further supported by the differences between the NSW and the Victorianexperiences that emerged through this analysis.

*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

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40 M. Somerville et al.

Literature reviewThe research project on which this paper is based began with a question from a schoolprincipal about how we can attract and retain new high-quality teachers in rural andregional Victoria. The attraction and retention of beginning teachers has become a signi-ficant issue in both Australia and internationally in recent years. Ramsey (2000), Ingersoll(2001) and McGaw (2001) have all highlighted issues of attracting and retaining newteachers in relation to increasing levels of retirements and resignations. Recent researchindicates that something significant happens in the first three to five years of teachers’careers to cause large numbers to want to leave the profession. A national survey of1200 beginning teachers conducted by the Australian Education Union (AEU) foundthat 45% of the beginning teachers surveyed indicated that they would not be teachingin ten years’ time (AEU, 2006). Similarly, a national survey of 1351 beginning teachersconducted by the Australian Primary Principals’ Association (APPA) found that‘although 93% of the survey respondents enjoy teaching, 24% indicate that they will beleaving the profession within five years’ (APPA, 2006, p. 8). In interviews with 50 newteachers in Massachusetts, USA, Johnson (2004) found that new-generation teachersapproach their work differently from those who commenced teaching in the 1960s and1970s. He reported that ‘although some expected to make education a long term career,there were surprisingly few who envisioned a long-term commitment to classroomteaching’ (Johnson, 2004, p. 28).

The importance of place, and the question of how new teachers learn about the placesand communities in which they work, is rarely mentioned in studies of new teachers. Astudy by the APPA suggested that rural and remote schools do not seem to be able to pro-vide sufficient incentives to attract new teachers, with 86% of survey respondents choos-ing to seek teaching appointments in urban areas (APPA, 2007). However, no furtherfindings were provided that would help us to understand whether this is generally truethroughout Australia, and why. Place has been noted as an undertheorised concept in edu-cational research generally (Gulson & Symes, 2007), and it has been proposed that ‘placetheory . . . has an enormous and as yet untapped potential to further our understanding andimprovement’ of vocational education (Falk & Balatti, 2004, p. 1). A place-basedapproach in a study of immigrant teachers in Israel (Elbaz-Luwisch, 2004) identified theconcept of place as a constitutive category; that is, a category that is an active force informing the identities and practices of teachers. In a country composed almost entirely ofimmigrants, how teachers learn about place and form community is highly significant. Weargue that place is an equally important category in regard to the preparation of teachersfor rural and regional Australia.

Some promising new research in Australia also takes up the notion of place in relationto rural and regional teacher education. Two projects, by McConaghy (2005) and Greenand Letts (2007), employ innovative theoretical paradigms that illustrate the potential ofplace to pose challenging questions in relation to new teachers and teacher retention.McConaghy (2005) uses Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of teacher becoming as a dynamic ofspace and place to pose a question about the relationship between place, mobility andlearning to be a teacher. This question is inflected by the place of the study, western NSW,where the challenge for new teachers, as noted in the Introduction, is the rapid staff turnover.McConaghy proposed ‘transience’ as a ‘key idea associated with contemporary ruralteaching’ but turned the naturalised assumptions about retention in NSW upside down byasking, ‘How much permanence should we aspire to?’ (McConaghy, 2005, p. 14). This isa question that became very relevant in our study.

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Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education 41

Green and Letts (2007) mapped the relationship between landscape, distance, isola-tion, location and student outcomes in rural and regional education in NSW. Their studyfound that ‘there was a marked geography of distinction emerging here: an articulation ofsocio-economic disadvantage and indigenousness, of race and class’ (Green & Letts,2007, p. 70). Throughout Australia the outcomes for rural and regional children and com-munities are generally poorer than those for metropolitan students (Green & Reid, 2004).For Indigenous students, who make up a large proportion of children in rural and remoteschools, they are even lower. These patterns are repeated in all States of Australia,inflected in each State and region by their different geographies and histories.

In Victoria in 2004, non-metropolitan school retention rates for rural and regional chil-dren were substantially lower (76%) than metropolitan rates (86.4%). Retention rates inthe study region, Gippsland (72.6%), were reported to be the lowest in the State (DEECD,2004). On three indices of disadvantage, Gippsland was found to be significantly moredisadvantaged than country Victoria, which in turn is significantly more disadvantagedthan metropolitan Melbourne (Bass Coast Shire Council, 2007). Such variable learningoutcomes for rural and regional children and communities can be linked to teacher educa-tion and ongoing teacher learning on the one hand, and the sustainability of rural andregional communities and places on the other (Green & Reid, 2004).

Although the sustainability of rural and regional communities is a complex issueinvolving many players, including teacher education, the role of schools is significant.In the study area, one of the key ways in which new people and new ideas are introducedinto schools is through the employment of beginning teachers. It is therefore critical toexplore the way in which new teacher graduates become teachers in these rural andregional schools and, in turn, the relationship of this process to the teacher educationcurriculum. A major assumption of the present study is that much of the process oflearning to become a teacher happens once a teacher begins their work in schools, andthat the process of learning to be a teacher in the specific communities in which theywork can only happen once they begin teaching in these communities. The relationshipbetween teacher education, the practicum and the learning that new teachers do oncethey enter the workplace, however, is critical in this learning. In the present study, wefocus on a dimension of this that has had the least attention – how new teachers learn todo their work once they begin teaching.

Conceptual frameworkThe place pedagogies approachWithin the concept of place as a constitutive category, as cited previously (Elbaz-Luwisch,2004), the conceptual framework informing the present study is the ‘place pedagogies’approach (Somerville, 2006b; 2007). This framework was developed from previous studiesabout how we learn about place and form community (Somerville, 2008). In a longitudinalstudy of new workers in a range of different occupations in NSW, it was found that work-place learning for the new teacher in the study involved a whole different dimension oflearning about place and community (Somerville, 2006a) than for other workers. Thisplace and community learning was critical for the new teacher’s survival, and thereforeretention, in a challenging secondary school. Even more significantly, however, the newteacher developed place responsive pedagogies that changed the learning outcomes of thechildren in his classes. These pedagogies had a direct relationship to issues of rural andregional sustainability. The current longitudinal study of new teachers was designed to

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explore whether these findings were more general across a range of teachers, schools andcommunities in rural and regional Victoria.

The place pedagogies approach includes a focus on story, body and contact zone, andis summarised below.

• Our relationship to place and community is constituted in our stories.• Place learning is embodied and local.• Learning place and forming community is a contact zone of contested stories.

Our relationship to place is constituted in storiesThis element assumes that humans express and communicate our relationship to placesthrough stories, so we are interested in the stories new teachers tell about the places wherethey learn to become a teacher. The analytical strategy of storylines, as developed in femi-nist post-structuralism (Davies, 2000; Søndergaard, 2002), was used to analyse the data:‘A storyline is a condensed version of a naturalized and conventional cultural narrative,one that is often used as the explanatory framework of one’s own and other’s practices andsequences of action’ (Søndergaard, 2002, p. 191). This approach can also be applied peda-gogically, as was the case in the previous new teacher study (Somerville, 2006b).Gruenewald (2003, p. 624), for example, maintains that dominant storylines of place‘deny our connection to earthly phenomena, . . . [and] construct places as objects or siteson a map to be economically exploited’. Changing our relationship to places means chan-ging the stories we tell about places: ‘If human beings are responsible for place making,then we must become conscious of ourselves as place makers and participants in thesociopolitical process of place making’ (Gruenewald, 2003, p. 627). For these reasons, anin-depth study of new teachers is required in order to understand the complex pedagogicalprocesses through which new teachers in rural and regional communities learn to becomea teacher.

Place learning is embodied and localThis element is based on the notion that our primary attachments to place are formedthrough the senses and that a sense of embodied connection to place is fundamental tolearning place and forming community. Ideas about the centrality of the experiencingbody-in-place have been noted in many philosophical approaches to place research (e.g.Abram, 1997; Merleau-Ponty, 1962). Australian philosopher Grosz (1994, p. 5) proposedthat ‘putting the body at the centre of our notion of subjectivity transforms the way wethink about knowledge, about power, about desire’. Soja (2000, p. 361) offers the body asan analytical tool, suggesting that ‘the space of the human body is perhaps the most crit-ical site to watch the production and reproduction of power’. Through such a lens theexperience of the lived body is viewed as productive of both places and of place stories. Inthe present study, we applied this to place by including a specific focus on the experienc-ing body in place, which informed the questions that we asked new teachers and the ana-lysis of the data.

Learning place and forming community is a contact zone of contested storiesThis element focuses attention on the characteristic of specific local places as the intersectionof multiple, and often contested, stories in a contact zone of difference. The characteristic

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of place as the site of the intersection of different stories is especially significant whenconsidering the multiplicity of intersecting place stories in the school classroom. The mainfunction of the in-between space of the contact zone is to preserve difference, even to thepoint of suspending meaning (Carter, 1992). Pedagogies of place participate in this con-tact zone, which means that the learner is required to continually engage with the difficultquestions, to move beyond their comfort zone and to refuse easy answers (Haig-Brown,2001). The ‘border work’ critical to negotiating difference in the contact zone (Somerville &Perkins, 2003) involves precarious, risky and difficult emotional work (Anzaldúa, 1987;hooks, 1990). The contact zone has been frequently noted as a space of transformativepotential (Haig-Brown, 2001; hooks, 1990; Soja, 2000); however, these transformationsare complex and require deep pedagogical work.

This place pedagogies framework was used as a lens through which to review the liter-atures in relation to the present study, to inform ethnographic interviews and observations,and to analyse and represent data.

Workplace learningThe second framework that is not typically applied to studies of new teachers is the work-place learning framework; that is, the study of how workers learn to do their work in theeveryday activities of the workplace (Billett, 2001). Teachers’ learning is considered as‘professional learning’ set apart from the insights that have been developed in workplacelearning theory through the study of non-professional occupations. Workplace learningtheory and research, however, has some important insights to offer to the study of hownew teachers learn to do their work. In the previously cited ethnographic study of newworkers across a range of different industries, it was found that there were many aspects oftheir work that could not be learned in preparatory vocational education (Somerville,2006a). More significantly, it was through the processes and practices of workplace learningthat new worker and learner subjectivities were formed (Somerville, 2004). Subjectivity,here, is understood as a self-in-process, as opposed to the more fixed liberal humanistnotion of identity (Weedon, 1996). In a study of information literacy and fire fighters, forexample, it was found that although preparatory training enabled new workers to enter theworkplace and ‘act as a fire fighter’, they only learned ‘to become a fire fighter’ in thephysical and social environment of the workplace (Somerville, 2006a). Understanding theformation of new teacher subjectivities in the workplace is critical for teacher education. Itis important to understand how new teachers can be supported to become the sort ofworker/learners we need to lead us into a sustainable future for rural and regional commu-nities (Somerville, 2006b).

MethodsEthnographic interviewsAt the core of this in-depth longitudinal study, then, informed by the place pedagogies andworkplace learning frameworks outlined above, we conducted semi-structured, ethno-graphic interviews with primary teacher education graduates about how they learned to dotheir work and how they learned about the places and communities in which they beganteaching. These ethnographic interviews were carried out with fifteen beginning teachersin 2007 during the first three months and again at the end of the first twelve months oftheir first year of full-time teaching. The same new teachers were interviewed again in

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their second and third years of teaching and ten new teachers were added to the study eachyear. The ten ethnographic interviews analysed in this paper are from the first interviewsin 2007. The ten interviews were selected by excluding those who gained employment insecondary schools or special developmental schools because of the different issues raisedin such settings. The focus of the interview analysis, then, is on how these ten primaryeducation graduate teachers learned to do their work and learned about the place and com-munity in which they work in their first few months of teaching.

The analysis that follows focuses on the conceptual framework of place as the lens throughwhich the interview transcripts are understood. The process of analysis was carried out in twophases. The first phase looked at place in its most simple expression in the study; that is, wheredid these new teachers come from and where did they choose to begin teaching? This gave us asense of who they were as individuals and their individual place history. In the second phase ofanalysis, the transcripts were read for storylines of place, according to the story element of theframework described previously. We asked what stories did these new teachers tell about placein their first three months of teaching? The stories of place were then categorised according tothe key storylines that emerged and the sub-themes within them.

Place-based surveysIn addition to the ethnographic interviews, we decided to develop a place-based survey toenable us to gain some data from the larger sample of graduate teachers who wanted toparticipate in the study. A place-based survey was designed as a pilot study to test the use-fulness of quantitative data to complement the in-depth qualitative data about new teachers’learning. Open-ended questions were included in the survey to provide some brief quanti-tative data to supplement the fine-grained ethnographic data from the interviews.

Analysis: survey dataSurveys were distributed to 80 new teachers, with 33 completing the survey (44% returnrate), of which 27 (82%) were females and six (18%) were males. This is generally repre-sentative of the primary teacher education student cohort. The survey included questionsrelating to place of origin of new teachers and their new school location.

Over half (55%) of the respondents indicated they had been born in Gippsland, with afurther 36% originating from Victoria (mainly Melbourne and environs), 6% from inter-state and 3% from overseas. In terms of current abode, two-thirds of the group (67%) cur-rently reside and teach in Gippsland (24% in the Latrobe Valley), with 33% living inMelbourne and environs or other parts of Victoria. This represents a net in-migration of12% to Gippsland from this group – a statistic that is interesting in the light of decliningpopulation and the sustainability of rural and regional communities.

The remainder of the survey was divided into two sections, with the first dealing withthe categories of story, body and contact zone in their place learning. The second sectionrelated to employment – why the job had been applied for, how long teachers intended toremain in that job and the level of knowledge of the school and region. In this paper,because of word limit constraints, we present only the analysis of the second section.

Applying for first positionsA number of themes emerged in response to the reasons for applying for initial teachingpositions, falling into two main categories – those of a more pragmatic or logistic nature

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(such as being close to home, or having a contact at the school) and those that were moreto do with the environmental milieu or possible connections with the school. It is interest-ing that the logistical reasons were not as prominent as expected, with more responsesarticulating relationships and ethos, as outlined in Table 1. This indicated that the graduateteachers were choosing schools with which they had an established prior relationship.

Remaining at first schoolParticipants were asked how long they intended to stay in their current school, with two-thirds indicating they would like to stay for three to five years or more and 30% for twoyears or less. Results outlined in Figure 1 suggest that the majority were looking for areasonable period of stability in their initial years despite the negative impact of fixed-

Table 1. Reasons for applying for position.

Themes: Why did you apply for this job?No. of timesmentioned

Environmental milieu Locale/Demographics Community focus 4Size of school 5Ethos – religious/special

needs/culture7

Relationships & connectedness

Already established relationship with school

8

Positive relationships with community

4

School had a good reputation

5

Logistics/pragmatics Convenience Close to home 6Had contacts there 4

Vacancy existed The position was advertised and a vacancy existed

3

Figure 1. Respondents’ intentions about length of stay in current school.

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How long do you intend to stay in your current school?

5 years plus Unsure

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term contracts, which was raised in comments such as ‘I feel it is very important to be con-nected to school but I feel contract works scares us into distancing ourselves in case we donot receive further employment there’. Although not questioned specifically about fixed-term contracts, they emerged as a significant factor in both the survey and interview data.

Previous knowledge of school/regionOnly 10% of participants indicated that they did not have any real knowledge of theschool/region, whereas 40% had some knowledge and 50% were very familiar with theschool or region. Of the 90% with previous knowledge, only 65% agreed that this know-ledge played a part in the consideration of applying for or accepting the position. For somenew teachers, the main issue was just getting a job. However, others were more circum-spect about the importance of having or not having previous knowledge of the school orthe region, ‘Yes, it made it easier to fit into the school community because I had priorknowledge of the school and its community’. This finding differs from studies conductedin NSW, where teachers were placed in communities where they had no prior experience.

How might local community play a part in your understanding of your school/region?Most respondents were very aware of the importance of the local community in assistingthem to understand their school/region, with almost every respondent answering this ques-tion along similar lines, as illustrated by the following sample of quotes:

School doesn’t just consist of the students and the staff members, it is much broader branch-ing out to the local community, it is the community that holds the school together. I aminvolved in many groups and enjoy learning about the area from different people.

The local community is mainly a farming community and the school is seen as a big part ofthe community.

Working with local community groups is important when working on school and local values.

Connectedness to school/regionParticipants were asked to rate their level of connectedness, first to their school andsecond to the region, using a Likert scale from 1 (not connected at all) to 7 (highlyconnected). Figure 2 outlines the results and shows that the level of connectednesswas quite high, with the mean score for the school (5.8) being slightly higher than thatfor the region (5.2).

When asked to explain reasons for differences between scores given for the schoolcompared with the region, the following comments were representative:

Greater connection with region than school

Most school cultures are similar in a way – the region has more variance in terms of cultureand demographics.

I don’t feel the school (being private) is a good representation of the rest of the community.

School management and politics does not create a sense of ‘connectedness’ that living withinthe region does.

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Greater connection with school than region

I am greatly interested in the school activities as it relates to me. Outside of the school envir-onment I like to be more private.

I think connection to the region will come after I grow in my understanding of the school andits community. As I am new, I still feel that I am not even very connected with the school, butthis is certainly growing.

Because I don’t live in the region and don’t attend their sporting clubs, community functionsetc. My interaction is solely to do with the school. I think I do need to try and connect withmy community more but I don’t live in the area – I’m about 25 minutes away.

In general, these comments suggest that these beginning teachers found thatschools have a similar sense of community to each other but are not necessarily con-nected to the communities beyond the school. They felt that their initial learninginvolved the school community rather than the communities beyond the school. Theydid not mention the ‘region’ as such but referred to the communities immediately sur-rounding the schools as the next site of learning place and forming community. Theseresponses were further interpreted in the light of the interview data they weredesigned to complement.

Analysis: interview dataTwo layers of analysis were carried out with the ten interviews that are the focus of thispaper. The first layer of analysis summarised individual context data from the interviews.Here we draw on this layer of analysis to introduce participants and summarise the keyfeatures of their relationships to the schools and communities in which they began teaching.The second layer analyses the storylines of place through which these new teachers under-stood the processes of learning their work and the places and communities in which theybegin teaching.

Figure 2. Respondents’ level of connectedness to school and region.

How connected do you feel?

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Highlyconnected

(7)

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30.3 21.2 12.19.1

4 3 21 (not

connectedat all)

00

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321.227.318.2

33.324.2to the region

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Biographical dataAll of those interviewed were females who began their first year of teaching in primaryschools in the Gippsland region. Based on their place of origin, they fall into two groups,which conform to their choice of school location. The first group grew up in rural commu-nities and have chosen to work in rural communities. Christy1 spent her childhood in thecountry and is very supportive of the idea of rural schools. Because of her interest in thelocal community, she chose a school with such involvement. Christy teaches at a smallprimary school in a rural setting, commuting 70 kilometres each way from her home inSouth Gippsland. Joan was also born in the country and grew up on a local farm in SouthGippsland. After completing an initial degree in Sport and Outdoor Education, she com-pleted the Graduate Diploma of Education (GDE) and secured a teaching position close toher local community. She believes that knowing most of her students prior to starting toteach them in the school setting is beneficial. She lives in a coastal town and commutes20 kilometres to a small rural primary school. Louise is from a medium-sized rural townwith a population of 12 000 people. Her undergraduate degree is in health. After workingin the health area for four years, she decided that teaching was what she wanted to do andshe applied for the GDE. She now teaches in a non-government primary school in thetown where she grew up.

The second group of interviewees grew up in the rural industrial environment ofLatrobe Valley and also have chosen to be employed in that location. Katrina moved to theLatrobe Valley from Melbourne when she was six years of age. She completed her Bachelor ofArts and GDE at the Gippsland campus. She currently lives in Moe and teaches at a prim-ary school 16 kilometres away in the nearby town of Morwell. Anne completed a com-bined degree in Business and Sport and Outdoor Education but was unsuccessful infinding satisfying work in this field. She was born in Moe and after finding employment ata non-government primary school, moved 30 kilometres to Traralgon, where she nowworks. Tess has always lived in the Latrobe Valley town of Morwell. She completed aDiploma of Foundation Studies (DoFS) in her first year of university to enable her to pur-sue her teaching degree. Upon graduation, she obtained a teaching position in a RomanCatholic school 25 kilometres from her home in Morwell.

A third group has chosen to work in a different location from where they grew up.Except for one interviewee, however, the difference in location is only a matter of degree.The distinction is usually related to the cultural and environmental differences betweenthe industrial area of Latrobe Valley and the surrounding rural areas and towns of ruralGippsland. Teresa initially started an apprenticeship as a chef but found that she did notenjoy it, so began her undergraduate degree in social welfare, finally deciding that thiswould provide a good basis for teaching. Marnie has always lived in the Latrobe Valley.She also completed a DoFS prior to her teaching degree. She now teaches at a RomanCatholic school in a rural regional town 60 kilometres west of where she grew up. Susangrew up in the Latrobe Valley and her undergraduate degree was in business, but follow-ing graduation the only job she could find was in a call centre. She considered this workutilised few of her talents or skills. Because of her interest in children, she applied for theGDE and was successful in obtaining a position in a rural school. She lives at home andcommutes 70 kilometres each way to her school. Lee grew up in New South Wales andthen moved to Melbourne. She now teaches in a small rural town in West Gippsland andtravels 15 minutes to work, which suits her family commitments.

Our preliminary analysis of the data therefore confirms that the majority interviewedhave remained in the area in which they grew up. Although the industrial region of

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Latrobe Valley is part of Gippsland, only those graduate teachers who grew up in the Valleychose to work in the schools there, which are regarded as challenging. Others travelledfrom the Valley to local rural and regional schools in the wider Gippsland region. In thissample there is only one new teacher who grew up outside of the area and chose to teachwithin the broader geographic region of Gippsland, representing a 10% gain for theregion, which is in line with our survey results. In general, the choice of teaching locationin which to begin their teaching is highly conservative with those who grew up in ruralcommunities choosing to teach in rural communities and those who grew up in theregional and industrial centre of the Latrobe Valley equally split between remaining in theValley and teaching in nearby rural communities.

Storylines of placeWithin the ten initial interviews we chose to analyse for this paper there is a large amountof rich ethnographic data through which to understand the processes of learning to becomea teacher in rural and regional Gippsland. Despite this rich data, there was little discussionfrom these new teachers about learning about the communities and places in which theybegan teaching. Contrary to the situation experienced in western NSW, these teacherscame from the regional communities in which they began teaching, so they assume thatthey know their communities – an assumption that later data revealed to be problematic.For these new teachers there was one pervasive storyline about new teacher learning in thefirst few months of teaching – the storyline of ‘classroom management’. In this section ofanalysis, we focus on storylines of the place of the classroom viewed through the dis-course of classroom management that the new teachers introduced into their learning.

The classroom as a space of teacher becomingWhen we analysed the storyline of classroom management through the lens of place itbecame clear that the class/room is the fundamental place of teacher becoming. The class-room began as an uninhabited space through which the relationships and pedagogicalpractices of the teachers became inscribed as a place. The discourse of classroom manage-ment is a powerful storyline in teacher education and teaching practice through whichthese new teachers understand learning to become a teacher. Disrupting the discourse ofclassroom management through the lens of place enables us to more clearly examine itseffects beyond the naturalised assumptions of teacher education and teaching practice. Forall new teachers in the study, learning in the space of the classroom was dominant. Theyexplained, ‘That’s how you learn to actually be in the classroom . . . I think the place youlearn is in the classroom, and I think the more you’re in the classroom the better’.

The significance of the classroom as a site for new teacher becoming was so powerfulthat new teachers who did not have ‘their own classroom’ believed that the process ofbecoming a teacher was compromised. Three of the new teachers experienced this disad-vantage. One was team teaching; one was employed to teach across a number of differentclasses; and another was employed as a specialist PE and IT teacher. Teresa, who wasteam teaching, said she was keen to teach alone the following year in order to ‘ground myteaching in, just in my classroom too . . . with all the kids and see, yeah, see how I cope,just by myself in that room’. Anne was employed as a specialist PE and IT teacher acrossa number of classes and said that she will not learn to be a ‘proper’ teacher until she hasher own classroom. Susan, too, felt the process of becoming a teacher was initiallyblocked because she was employed to teach across a number of classes. She felt that the

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failure to achieve a sense of becoming a proper teacher was compounded by the insecurityof a one year contract. Although recognising that the classroom is located within a schooland a community, for these new teachers the classroom was the primary place of attach-ment and belonging, a place of intense workplace learning and new teacher becoming.

The variety of ways through which the discourse of classroom management wasenacted by new teachers provides important insights into the processes of new teacherlearning and the formation of new teacher subjectivities. When analysing these storylines,it is useful to understand the class/room as a space rather than a place and to think in termsof the production of space. (For a general examination of the production of space, seeLefebvre (1991).) A classroom can be seen as a space that is co-produced by teacher andstudents and is constituted anew each time a new class moves into that space. A classroomonly becomes a place temporarily while it is the home of a particular collectivity of chil-dren, described as a ‘class’, and their classroom teacher, the teacher who belongs in, andco-creates the place of that class. Analysing the storylines of classroom management tellsus how the space of the classroom is produced as a place, a place where the subjectivitiesof children are co-constituted. In the place of the classroom, children and teacher(s) mutu-ally understand, invent and reinvent the rules for occupying that collectively constitutedspace.

New teachers understand classroom management initially as a process of establishinga relationship with the children in the class. Rather than developing individual one-on-onerelationships, it is primarily about dealing with the collectivity of children in the class:‘dealing with different kids, different age groups’; ‘knowing kids’ backgrounds helps readwhat’s going to happen in the classroom’. Most of the new teachers described how theydraw on the various systems of reward and punishment, such as ‘sad and happy faces’, or‘behaviour management plans’ that operate in the school or with particular teachers.Those with their own classrooms, however, often talked about the ways they use the spaceof the classroom as a space where they can orchestrate the relationships between materialobjects, children and the teacher to produce certain responses. We called this the choreog-raphy of the space of the classroom.

I very quickly figured out which ones didn’t sit near each other, and rearranged them after acouple of weeks. I knew sort of how which ones you don’t put anywhere near each other andwhich ones work best close to the front and things like that. But then it was just a bit of a tryand just see how it works and a bit of trial and error.

Rearranging furniture and children in different spatial relationships with each other,the teacher produces the space of the classroom as a place they come to inhabit, a place ofidentity and belonging. In this space the teacher uses her voice, and the voices of the chil-dren, to conduct the choreography of the space and create particular effects and subjectiv-ities. One teacher, for example, described how she used her voice, ‘yelling’ when it wasnecessary and punishing the children who misbehaved by sending them to the back of theclass where they ‘sit there and watch the wall and miss out on what everyone else is doing.They just, especially my boys, they don’t like to be isolated. Take them away from theirfriends and they get really upset’. The rearranging of children in the space of the roomintroduces a new spatial dynamic, disrupting the children’s socialising and interaction,spatially and visually, with the rest of the children in the room.

Although each new teacher establishes the particular choreographies of their class-room space, the processes through which the space of the classroom comes into being israrely made visible. One new teacher discussed her ‘shock’ at realising that she had to

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train entry level children into the choreography of the classroom: ‘I couldn’t believe howmuch you’ve got to train the preps. Like, I came in at the end of the year last year, and Ithought, “Oh, yeah, this will be easy. They all know what they have to do and things.” Butno way. It was a shock for me.’ It was only at this time that the learning that is required toco-produce the subjectivities of teacher and learner in the space of the classroom is apparent.Once this is learned, much of the classroom choreography becomes the taken-for-granted,naturalised way that schools operate for both teachers and learners.

For this new teacher, the initial process of learning was described as ‘jumping in –really, it was like a jump in the deep end’. In the beginning, this new teacher borrowed thestandardised practices of reward and punishment (i.e. ‘happy face, sad face’) employed bythe school, but progressed to choreographing the classroom with the placement of desksand positioning of children to control the social interactions made possible by the arrange-ments of the space. Now, she has moved beyond that to her own distinctive classroomchoreography: ‘Other teachers might come in and think, “Oh my God!” But – yeah, but Ilike noise, and I like the kids to chat, and they know when to sit on the floor and behave,and they know when to do certain things – so, they’re taking ownership now.’ At thispoint, both teacher and children inhabit the classroom place as home. Classrooms, then,are not natural spaces but are learned and co-produced by teachers and children, and inthat co-production both teacher and learner subjectivities are constituted.

The classroom is not a place that is separate from ‘the community’, or more properly,the communities in which the children live. The children bring these communities into thespace of the classroom where they are then managed and regulated. The discourse ofclassroom management appears to operate in particularly powerful ways in geographiclocations where there are high levels of socio-economic disadvantage. For new teacherslocated in such schools, learning the choreography of the classroom is intense and uncom-fortable as they confront a contact zone of class and cultural difference.

Classroom management is a big thing because being in a school that’s in a low socio-economicarea and, as much as I hate to say it, it’s like our school takes all the rejects from everywhereelse, the ones [who] get expelled. And it’s a high Indigenous population, too, at the school.So, the first three weeks were letting the kids develop a relationship with me and me developone with them, so that then they knew exactly what was expected of them in my classroom –just getting to know them so I could actually teach them. If they were unsettled and theydidn’t feel secure in the classroom, then whatever I was trying to teach them was just going togo in one ear and out the other. So it was pretty tough.

The classroom is a place where differences, such as those based on social class andrace, are learned by new teachers. For this new teacher the primary focus is on letting thechildren develop a relationship with her and her with them. This relationship is about themutual learning that underpins the choreography of the classroom. The children need tolearn what is expected of them in this classroom, and the teacher needs to get to knowthem so she can choreograph the space. Once the children are settled and secure in theclassroom, the conditions of becoming a teacher can be met. Through this process, theclassroom is transformed from an empty space into a place alive with the choreography oflearning. Reading the body in this choreography is revealing of the operations of the com-plex storylines of classroom management.

I know one of my Koori2 students finds it really, really hard to speak out loud and writebecause she writes exactly how she would say it. So the language is very, very different.She’s a pretty shy kid, so getting her to talk you have to make sure you remind her, ‘You need

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to look at me when you’re talking to me. You need to put your head up and I need to see yourlips and your eyes so that I know you are focused on me and then you can tell me.’ . . . She’svery reluctant, because the two previous years she’s been at school she’s always been toldthat, don’t speak like that, or don’t do this or don’t do that, so she’s become more and morewithdrawn and reluctant to speak, which is a shame because she’s a fantastic little kid and herwriting is excellent. Like the imagination on her is fantastic. But because she, the way theschool system is, they need the kids to conform to their way of doing things.

The Koori child has already learned, prior to entering this new teacher’s classroom,that she is an inappropriate body in the space of the classroom. The new teacher noticeshow this inappropriate body is signified. The Koori child finds it hard to speak up in class,she writes as she speaks, responds with her head down and does not make eye contact. Inenacting the regulatory practices of the school system, the new teacher tries to manage theKoori child’s body so that she responds as a proper school body. The new teacher doesobserve the contradictions, however, that the Koori child’s writing is excellent, and shevalues her vivid imagination. Even as a new teacher, or maybe because she is a newteacher, she is also aware of the weight of the regulatory practices of schooling, of thestandardising measures through which this child will be judged. Ultimately, the newteacher acknowledges that the Koori child will be judged as a failure because ‘the schoolsystem needs the kids to conform to their way of doing things’.

This child’s school report, which the new teacher will write, must signify that theKoori child has failed to achieve the status of the proper learner in the space of the class-room, just as some new teachers fail to achieve the status of proper teacher because oftheir difference. No matter what the new teacher has learned in teacher education, theschool is a powerful place for the formation of learner and teacher subjectivities. Althoughwe could further discuss the specific findings from this study about outcomes for Indigenouslearners and teachers in this study, that is not the focus of this paper. The point here is thata place-based analysis of new teacher becoming reveals the classroom as the primary siteof new teacher learning. It is a place where difference and sameness are encountered,reproducing disadvantage and alienation for some learner and teacher bodies. It is not sep-arate from the communities in which it is located, but an inextricable part of them throughthe children who come into the school. Community and communities are always alreadypresent.

ConclusionThe survey and interview data complement each other in the analysis of this study of newteachers’ learning in rural and regional Victoria. Contrary to the findings from other studiesboth nationally and internationally, the majority of new teachers in this study intend tostay in teaching for three to five years or more. They also indicated that they intend to stayworking in Gippsland. These intentions do not only tell us about retention but they alsohelp to explain the nature of schools and the relationship between teachers, learners andcommunities. The fact that teachers in Gippsland are likely to remain in the schools wherethey begin teaching reinforces McConaghy’s (2005) question of how much permanencewe should aspire to, but in an inverse sense to the NSW studies, where staff turnover is theproblem (Green & Letts, 2007).

For the Gippsland region, the question is more about the stability of teaching staff, theconservatism of schools, and the challenge of introducing new ideas and practices in thiscontext. For the 30% of new teachers who intend to stay for less than this time, writtencomments on the survey, strongly supported by interview data, suggest that contract

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employment disrupts both the initial process of becoming a teacher and their attachment toschools and communities in which they begin teaching. This aspect of new teacheremployment is common in Victoria, where new teachers are typically offered a one yearcontract. Although we did not specifically address this issue in either the initial survey orinterviews reported in this paper, comments were made unsolicited in both surveyresponses and interviews.

In our analysis of the biographical material, we noted that nine out of ten of the newteachers interviewed came from Gippsland, and are most likely to seek work in the imme-diate communities in which they grew up or currently live. Because of this, unlike theteachers who begin teaching in western NSW but come from the east coast, new teachersin this study were not challenged to learn about the communities and places in which theybegan teaching. The community was taken for granted. For these teachers, the space of theclassroom was found to be the most significant place for new teacher learning. Theyunderstood this learning through the powerful naturalised discourses of classroom man-agement that are common in both teacher education and teaching practice. Analysing thedata through the lens of place has enabled us to ‘make the familiar strange’ and to examinethe ways that this discourse operates to shape the learning of new teachers.

It became apparent that classrooms are not natural spaces but are learned and co-producedby teachers and children. That learning may be made visible only in the case of new teachersand children who are entering schools or classroom spaces for the first time. In the processof learning in the space of the classroom, both new teacher and learner subjectivities areconstituted. Classrooms are places in which difference is encountered and learned, in par-ticular in relation to social class and race. Although these new teachers in rural andregional Victoria assumed that they were familiar with the communities in which theybegan teaching, their practices made evident the powerful normalising and even excludingeffects of the discourses of classroom management. For the Aboriginal child, there was nopossibility of connecting with her world outside the classroom and yet she brings her com-munity into the classroom in her language and her embodiment.

New teachers learn that in the space of the classroom some children, and some newteachers, cannot achieve the status of the proper learner or proper teacher (body). Usingthe lens of place has enabled us to make problematic the ‘taken for granted’ assumptionsof the discourse of classroom management and to make evident the ways that the space ofthe classroom is co-produced, and in turn constitutes the subjectivities of learners andteachers within that space. Nevertheless, the space of the classroom is an inextricable partof the rural and regional communities in which these children live, and what happens inthe classroom profoundly affects the learning outcomes for these children and their ruraland regional communities.

AcknowledgementsWe would like to acknowledge the very detailed and helpful comments of the anonymous reviewersof this paper, which led to the final version that is published here. We also acknowledge the signific-ant contribution that Miriam Potts has made as a Research Assistant working on the New TeachersProject. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the BERA Conference, Edinburgh,September 3–6, 2008.

Notes1. For ethical reasons pseudonyms are used for the interview data presented in this paper.2. ‘Koori’ refers to the self-identification of Aboriginal people in south eastern Australia.

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Notes on contributorsMargaret Somerville is Professor of Education (Learning and Development) and Research Directorof the Institute of Regional Studies at Monash University Gippsland Campus. Her research interestsinclude alternative methodologies and creative writing in research, vocational preparation andworkplace learning for new workers, workplace safety, place based learning for sustainable commu-nities and environments, the role of teachers and schools in building sustainable rural and regionalcommunities and retention of teachers in hard to staff schools.

Margaret Plunkett is a Lecturer in education at Monash University Gippsland Campus. Her interestsinclude mixed methodology research, particularly in the fields of gifted education, teacher profes-sional development and beginning teachers.

Michael Dyson is a Senior Lecturer in education at Monash University Gippsland Campus. Hisinterests include autoethnographic research, the reconceptualisation of teacher education, learning inthe digital age, and the educational use of digital portfolios to facilitate teaching and learning.

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New teachers learning in rural and regional Australia

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