Sustainability is a central challenge facing the future viability of Murray-Darling Basin (MDB) communities in rural Australia. Faced with environmental uncertainty and its associated community impacts, sustainability has at once been positioned as the path to a prosperous future and a flash point of community conflict. Key to these tensions has…

In 2017, SPERA [Society for the Provision of Education in Rural Australia] members and supporters were surveyed on their views of rural education. Forty-two participants responded to the online survey through targeted and snowball recruitment. Participants shared their opinions of the main issues in rural education, the challenges facing rural…

This paper explores the idea that rurality is important in children's learning even though it is in conflict with dominant educational discourses. Crucial to identifying this was the use of research methods that focused on rural meanings. In this paper we report on an ethnographic study that explored the experiences of parent supervisors of…

For a number of very remote students in Australia, distance education is regarded as the most effective means of providing access to primary school education. For these students isolation is experienced not only in relation to distance from a physical school, but also from a professionally trained educator and the instructional benefits this…