Rhizomatics and The Arts: Challenging conceptions of rural teaching

For the past 150 years metro-centric research into rural education in Australia has produced 'evidence' of the deficits in rural education. Many of these studies have, unknowingly, silenced rural voices by creating questions and representing data in the hegemonic, metro-centric language of urban based research. The study discussed in this paper (No One, 2007) was an attempt to bring rural voices to the centre and present an alternative discussion of the 'problem' of rural education: one which acknowledged the nature of rural place and the importance of teacher place relations in rural education. The research explored the nature of the relations between place and becoming-teacher for five graduate teachers in rural schools in northern New South Wales, Australia. I was acutely aware of the plethora of studies into rural education which described the geographic isolation and culture shock experienced by graduate teachers. But where were their stories of place? Where were their representations of their experiences? What was their lived experience of place? And how could I 'access' these experiences such that the data collected would enable me to portray them in ways that could lead t o new perspectives on, and insights into, this phenomenon? To avoid the reproduction of deficit language the study supported the participants (rural teachers) in using the arts to express their experiences of rural teaching. This resulted in the creation of artefact's with depth and breadth: some created by the participants; others created by the researcher as part of the analysis.