Special issue editorial comment.
Boylan, Colin
As SPERA celebrates its 25th year as the national organisation
whose voice on rural and remote education and training in Australia, the
Executive determined mark this historical milestone with a number of
significant events.
The 2009 annual national conference with its theme Education in a
Digital Present: Enriching Rural Communities continues to explore
innovative and creative ways of providing education to students located
in rural and remote places. During the 25th Conference, the roles,
purposes and impacts of digital information technologies will be
explored as they transform the way we work, learn and communicate. In
this digital revolution, educators, parents and systems are engaged in a
comprehensive search for strategies and tools for effective online/
digital teaching based on the principles of learning as a social process
and engaging the advantages of new technologies to support e-learning
decision-making, instructional choices, program and course planning and
the delivery of curricula.
A second SPERA initiative is the production of this special issue
of the journal.
This special issue of Education in Rural Australia will be
available to all conference participants at the Flinders University venue in July 2009. In this special issue, the welcome message provided
by the current SPERA President Emmy Terry, highlights a number of
SPERA's achievements over the past 25 years. The success of SPERA
at both the state and national level in improving educational access and
provision for rural and remote communities is one of SPERA's
fundamental goals.
In the second article in this issue by SPERA's three Life
Members, Marie Dale, Sheila King and Colin Boylan, these three reflect
on the origins of SPERA, its growth into the professional organisation that it is today and identify future directions and challenges for this
professional organisation. To have all three longtime, dedicated and
committed SPERA Life Members contribute to this special issue is a
significant event for SPERA.
The article by Andrew Wallace and Colin Boylan, the authors expand
upon the idea of 'the rural lens' that they raised in their
2007 Keynote address at the 23rd national SPERA Conference in Perth. In
this article they use the rural lens as a focussing mechanism on policy
development matters including the development of a national rural
education policy, school and community sustainability, student
engagement and retention, and the differences in student achievement
levels between rural and non-rural places.
The article by Graeme Lock, Jo-Anne Reid, Bill Green, Wendy
Hastings, Maxine Cooper and Simone White introduces the readership to
the TERRAnova project which seeks to examine successful teacher
education course, programs and strategies that promote rural teaching as
an attractive, long term career option. This national project is a
significant multi-state research project that has the potential to
identify best practice and inform all pre-service teacher education
programs of successful ways and means of attracting, recruiting and
retaining newly appointed teachers to rural and remote locations.
John Halsey's contribution to the issue raised the key
question: Australia's Sustainability: A New Policy Front for Rural
Education? analyses five important issues within the concept of
sustainability as they relate to rural education nationally. The article
argues that now is the time to refocus and reconsider the typical
reactive mode of operation for rural education and with the input of
good leadership to develop proactive policies for rural education that
will benefit not only rural schools and their communities but the whole
nation.
Collectively all the authors in this special issue are asking all
rural Australians to rethink and refocus rural education in ways that
promotes the diversity and dynamism that exists in rural school and
communities in the future.
Finally, in 2009, as SPERA celebrates 25 years as the voice of
rural education nationally, there will be three issues of the journal to
mark this important event.
Colin Boylan
Guest Editor
Colin Boylan
Life Member, SPERA
Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga
