Natalie Downes

Why we should ditch metrocentricity now (and read about a new book too)

December 1, 2022rural and regional education, rural and regional students, rural and remote education in AustraliaAARE blog, AARE conference, Ada Goldsmith, Jennifer Gore, Jenny Dean, Jess Harris, Jo-Anne Reid, Kristy O’Neill, Laurie Poretti, Leanne Fray, Naomi Barnes, Natalie Downes, Philip Roberts, Sally Patfield, Samantha McMahon

We are coming to the end of the conference but still happy to take blogs about papers you heard and papers you’ve given. I’m on jenna@aare.edu.au

Sally Patfield, Senior Research Fellow, Teachers and Teaching Research Centre, School of Education, The University of Newcastle writes on the Rural Education Symposium

Knowledge and rurality: Deconstructing geographic narcissism in education

Philip Roberts, Natalie Downes, Jenny Dean, Kristy O’Neill, Samantha McMahon, Jo-Anne Reid, Laurie Poretti, Ada Goldsmith

Approximately 7 million people – or 28% of the Australian population – live in rural and remote areas across the country. Rural communities are unique and diverse, not only in terms of geography and demographics, but also in terms of the emotional and material realities of residents’ lives, framed within the interrelated context of the local and the global.

We’re all used to hearing the phrase ‘educational disadvantage’; it’s rolled out repeatedly to capture and conceptualise the apparent education achievement gap between rural students and their metropolitan peers. Particularly when it comes to standardised tests like NAPLAN, it’s a well-worn narrative that the achievement gap between rural and urban students is persistent and widening.

This symposium turned this narrative on its head by interrogating the metro-centric bias inherent within curriculum, educational institutions like schools and universities, and even within academia itself. It re-frames how we think of the ‘problem’ by asking: ‘what, and whose, knowledge is valued?’ And: ‘what if its not rural students who are failing to perform, but rather, the education system which is failing rural communities by marginalising the perspectives of the rural?”

The four papers presented within this symposium weaved together a powerful argument that challenges the way we think about the very nature of ‘educational disadvantage’ by questioning existing practices and illustrating the important role rural knowledges and ways of being can play for young people, their families, and the future of their communities.

Each paper provided a different layer of insight and analysis: granular case studies that demonstrate how schools are already integrating rural knowledges into curriculum enactment; large-scale analyses of achievement data which examine how school location influences senior secondary outcomes; an examination of the experiences of rural students in higher education, focusing in particular on notions of belonging; and finally, questioning the way research may (perhaps inadvertently at times) even (re)produce deficit notions of the rural, marginalising different ways of knowing, being and doing beyond the metropolis.

The first three presentations brought to the fore key issues around the ideas of spatiality, inequality and knowledge production: that is, that rural space has a reality and, relatedly, that rurality is “reality producing”. In this way, the presenters clearly demonstrated how notions of space and place are central to both the maintenance and representation of social difference.

Overall, this symposium challenges us to think about how we define and engage with the rural – both as educators and researchers. In the third presentation, Natalie Downes and colleagues sadly showed how rural university students see rurality as misrecognised and misrepresented in their coursework and curriculum, with rural locations and careers portrayed as problematic – places associated with staff shortages and a lack of opportunity, for example. Unfortunately, rural students reported that the way rurality was depicted not only impacted how they felt at university but also once they returned home to their communities. Clearly there is much more to do to transform how we embed rural knowledges and promote rural careers across higher education degrees.

In the fourth presentation, the stark reality of how rurality is commonly portrayed was again emphasised, with the presenters highlighting that the fact that far too many projects do not engage with the complexities of rurality in definition nor in analysis, often just mentioning ‘the rural’ in passing as the site of the research. The authors made the case that context matters in education research and how we position and work alongside rural communities plays an important role in either perpetuating or dismantling longstanding hierarchies of power and knowledge.

COMMUNITY MATTERS BOOK LAUNCH by Naomi Barnes

On Wednesday, the AARE Local/Global Issues in Education book series launched Community Matters: The Complex Links Between Community and Young People’s Aspirations for Higher Education by Jennifer Gore, Sally Patfield, Leanne Fray and Jess Harris.

The book explores the complex meanings of community, the pressure young people face to attend university, access to higher education, university aspirations in rural communities, and understanding why community matters when young people express a desire to attend university.

In reading an excerpt, Gore described how the book was about how “community helps to soften blunt equity categories and remind researchers, policy makers and equity practitioners of the human conditions that mediate the gap between important analytical categories that undergird important social justice efforts”.

The book is due to be published on 30 December 2022

Community Matters: The Complex Links Between Community and Young People’s Aspirations for Higher Education offers a new lens on equity of access. The policy focus, nationally and globally, on widening participation for under-represented target groups too readily treats such groups as if they have a singular voice, a singular history, and a singular set of concerns. Drawing on the perspectives of Australian school students, their parents/carers, teachers, and a vast array of residents from seven diverse communities, this book uses the lens of ‘community’ to reframe inequitable access. It does so by recognising the complex social and cultural forces at play locally that shape how young people form and articulate their post-school futures.

Offline distance education (already happening all around Australia) can be highly successful

May 4, 2020rural and remote education in Australiadistance education in Australia, distance learning, Natalie Downes, offline distance education, online and distance education, Philip Roberts, school distance education

As many of our children continue with their online learning, there is concern that those with limited access to technology will be disadvantaged. Access to online technology is indeed important, however Australia has been schooling children through distance education long before online connectivity was an option. As distance education teachers, we can reassure concerned families, and schools new to distance education, that offline learning can be very successful. In fact some of the best learning occurs in the offline component of distance education.

Getting the offline work out to students, given the sudden transition we are all experiencing, might be a logistical problem to some schools at the moment. However, with every passing day our schools are finding new solutions. In NSW schools are lending computers to students who don’t have them, other schools are arranging mail outs, or delivering paper copies of work and others are sending out USB drives with work uploaded.

What is offline distance education?

Distance education schools allow children who cannot attend a face-to-face school to stay in their own home while working with a teacher who is located at a physical school elsewhere. Students in these schools communicate with their teacher by post, telephone, and online platforms, and the teacher sends them lessons to complete each week with the assistance of a supervisor, who is usually a parent. This is similar to what happening right now in most of our schools.

While teachers communicate regularly with their students, the majority of learning in distance education schools is completed offline, with students and home supervisors using lesson guides sent by teachers. In the younger years of schooling teachers send scripted lessons so that supervisors can read these to their students.

In the higher years of schooling the students work more independently, relying less on the supervisor. It is important to note that like many parents at the moment, these supervisors are un-trained educators, and they are also managing day-to-day work, life, and childcare responsibilities.

One of the benefits of distance education is the valuable and productive collaboration it encourages between parent supervisors and teachers.

Our research – what works in offline distance education

Our research explored the experiences of parent supervisors of primary school

distance education students. We found the opportunities distance education can bring to schooling are important and should be part of the discussions we have when talking about distance education.

Instead of looking at what students are missing out on, we need to flip the conversation and look at what these children now have access to.

Although distance education schools are usually expected to operate as much like face-to-face schools as possible, supervisors report that the best results occur when they are flexible and make the most of incidental learning opportunities. Children are still able to learn the concepts intended in the lessons set by the teachers, but the supervisors adapt the lessons to meet the students’ contextual needs, building on their life experiences, and fitting in with their families’ life.

For example, one family described how they knew one of the lessons they would need to do involved teaching their children to count, so instead of doing it between 9-3 in the schoolroom they taught their children to count while mustering cattle. Another described teaching her children mathematical concepts while doing housework. In these examples, school and home became integrated, and learning became a part of day to day life of the children. The environment students had access to became a learning advantage, not a disadvantage.

Learning to count while mustering cattle is certainly not the way a face-to-face classroom would normally operate. It is teaching in a manner that is adaptive and responsive to the different needs of students and their families. But the outcome is the same, that is, the children now know how to count.

Those supervisors who reported trying to ‘do’ schooling in a manner similar to face-to-face school experienced problems. It was difficult to organise their children’s schooling between 9-3, around all the other expectations of working on remote properties. Supervisors were then finding they needed to make a choice between their farm/business, or their children’s education, causing large amounts of stress for them. Parents would also describe how their children struggled with the high volume of sedate work, and with content that did not relate to their children’s life experiences at all. The parents reported how their children would then become disheartened and disengage with school because they felt schooling didn’t value or understand their life experiences, and learning became a struggle because they didn’t understand the examples used.

What does this mean for the schooling in the current climate?

In the current circumstance, with schooling in Australia rapidly shifting to learning at home, the insights of distance education suggest that:

The intended outcome of the lesson should be clear to supervisors – that way parents can take incidental opportunities to help their children learn.
We need to think of education more broadly than formal face-to-face schooling.
Parents can restructure the day to fit the child’s rhythm.
We need to make sure we have breaks as well. Pick the opportunities to ‘teach’ and make other times just family time.

While the distance education mode of schooling was at times challenging to the supervisors in our study , they all reported they would choose this mode of schooling over any other option due to the benefits it provided.

Students don’t need to have access to all the things they did in face-to-face schools because of the wide-range of rich educational opportunities in their homes. We can choose to now rethink how we see schooling and embrace the experiences around us.

Face-to-face schooling in a classroom with a teacher from 9-3 doesn’t work for some children, and it shouldn’t have to. Distance education is a key example of this. It is already working for thousands of students every year.

Yes indeed, as many parents are now finding out, supporting older children to learn some specialist subjects can be daunting. But it’s no less daunting than, with the support and guidance of a teacher who is physically somewhere else, teaching a pre-literate or pre-numerate child to read and count. Parents do this every day in remote areas across Australia.

Philip Roberts is an Associate Professor (Curriculum Inquiry / Rural Education) at the University of Canberra and Research Leader of the Rural Education and Communities Research Group and ARC DECRA fellow at the University of Canberra, where he convenes units across the fields of Educational Sociology and Curriculum Inquiry. His major ongoing research focuses on place, the sustainability of rural communities, and the interests of the least powerful in our society. Philip’s work is situated within rural sociology, the sociology of knowledge, educational sociology and social justice and is informed by the spatial turn in social theory and sustainability. He leads the University of Canberra’s Rural Education & Communities Research Group. Philip is on Twitter @DrPhilRob

Natalie Downes is a research assistant in the Rural Education & Communities Research Group in the Faculty of Education, University of Canberra. Her research interests include rural distance education, rural-regional sustainability and the ethical working impact of working with rural people and communities. Natalie also works with the University of Canberra Widening Participation unit assisting with program evaluation and reporting and has previously worked as a Research Officer at the university. She has been an executive member of the Society of the Provision of Education in Rural Australia and editor of the Board of the International Journal of Rural Education. She has worked on projects with the Rural Education Research Student’ Network which focuses on supporting students, early career researchers and community members interested in rural education. Natalie is on Twitter @NatDownes10

We would like to acknowledge the knowledge and experiences shared with us by teachers and parents for whom this mode of learning is the day to day norm

Online schooling and distance ed? Don’t be afraid, we’ve been doing and improving it for 100 years

March 23, 2020online learning and distance education, rural and remote education in Australiadistance learning, Natalie Downes, online learning, Philip Roberts, school distance education, school of the air

Amid all the concerns about closing schools and setting up online learning In Australia it is important to note that Australia is actually a world leader in school distance education. Indeed, distance learning is not only achievable for Australian students, but very normal for many students around our large island continent. In rural and remote regions of Australia, students have been learning ‘by distance’ since the inception of ‘school of the air’ in Alice Springs over 100 years ago.

We want to tell you about distance learning in Australia and how our nation’s experiences and development of distance learning can help as we move into closing our schools. We know parents are worried that their children will be disadvantaged, particularly those in the final years of schooling. Many parents worry that they won’t be able to support their children’s learning at home. Teachers are worried about how to develop and deliver lessons online

What is distance learning?

Distance learning in Australia usually involves students working remotely with their teacher who leads their class using a combination of ‘synchronous’ and ‘asynchronous’ learning. Synchronous learning is where children are learning in real time, often with other students who join in from their remote locations, and asynchronous learning is where learning is online but without real time interaction. While distance education originally involved communication via post and two-way radio, technological advancement now sees this occurring through more advanced forms of technological communication using laptops or computers, video conferencing and so on. This technology allows students to interact face-to-face with their teachers and with other students both in their remote school and elsewhere.

At present distance education schools are typically delivered to students who cannot attend the local school. This is usually because students are deemed to live too far away from a school to reasonably attend, have chronic illnesses, are travelling, or to make available subjects a school can’t offer due to lower numbers wanting to take them, for instance languages. School authorities expect these students to work in almost the same manner as children in a face-to-face school do, with set hours for schooling and a designated learning space. In the early years of schooling, teachers provide lessons that are scripted almost word for word for supervisors to implement with their students, and these are usually given to the supervisors weeks in advance.

The many ways distance learning is used in schools across Australia

Today most states and territories in Australia offer distance education programs. For example in NSW, the Access program offers a shared curriculum for senior secondary students across five clusters of isolated schools across the state. Small cohorts of students interact with each other and their teacher through videoconferencing and collaborative technologies. It has been operating since about 1990.

Within the Access program the Riverina and Northern Borders Access programs began in 1990 and in more remote areas the ‘Wilvandee’ Access program – linking Wilcannia, Ivanhoe and Menindee (initially) began in 1994. Schools within a vicinity share a teacher in specialist subjects, with the specialist teacher physically situated at one of the network schools. In this way schools are able to provide a breadth of curriculum access in the senior secondary years that would otherwise not be possible due to student and staff numbers.

Schools co-timetable to ensure students have half their lessons as live video conference lessons. The other half comprises of structured learning activities using a learning management system, such as Moodle or the newer Microsoft schools products. Students in Access programs attend their local community school for these lessons, even though they may in practice have no ‘traditional’ lessons at their school.

Also in NSW, in 2015 the Aurora College was established as a virtual selective high school to ensure rural and isolated students in NSW could access selective schooling (where enrolment is based on academic merit) regardless of location. Here students from all across the state, who have passed the selective schools test, learn in a virtual environment organized in a similar manner to the Access program. The continued success of Aurora College shows that online learning in Australia can extend academically gifted students as well as provide the usual curriculum.

While we have used examples from NSW, similar programs exist around Australia in other states and territories. For instance in large parts of Western Australia education is provided through distance education and school of the air.

It is also important to note that while online learning is an important part of distance education, it is not the only way students undertake lessons. Students also undertake lessons ‘offline’ using learning materials provided by the teachers to guide them.

What can schools and teachers learn from our distance education experience?

We have reviewed research literature about the use of technology to connect students to schooling and found there are five main types of relationships involved. Distance education teachers are working with these relationships, and we think they would be crucial to developing successful online or distance education programs.

Learner to teacher relationship

This involves how the learner and teacher are connected. What is the teacher-student relationship? What are the interpersonal experiences when the student is involved in face to face learning? Is the child engaged and motivated, connected?

Learner to learner (peer) relationships

How are peers connected? How is peer learning encouraged and supported? Is it moderated?

Learner’s relationship to the content

How do we link students to the content? Can they work with it outside face to face teaching? What type of content should be used? How does the content support knowledge building? What is the role of the learner?

Learner to system relationship

Using the right tools to engage the student with the content. How do learners interact with the technology? Is the navigation and pace of learning working? Structured v unstructured.

Vicarious interaction or social presence

What is the social presence of the child? Are they ‘being present’, feeling they belong, able to feel the support and presence of other children in the group from their remote access? Are they experiencing that ‘being at school’ sense?

While all of this might sound daunting to some, many isolated parents, with Distance Education provision, support their children to learn literacy and numeracy from kindergarten. Some parents describe this type of learning as more effective and connected to their students’ needs and interests, because of the flexibility it allows.

Distance learning is also not the panacea. There are many families, particularly in remote and other poorer communities, who don’t have access to the necessary technology or internet service. Others don’t have the experience or prior learning to support their children in online learning. This is one reason why programs like the NSW Access program that run through schools are valuable and shouldn’t be replaced by distance learning as the only option.

The future of schooling

Overall, these schools remind us that distance learning is possible, as long as we see that ‘school’ doesn’t have to mean numbers of children attending one setting together. In fact there are many advantages of this learning mode. For example, in the Access networks teachers know their students and contexts, which makes for richer learning when thinking back to basic education theory. Students in distance education or Schools of the Air have access to a rich learning environment in their day to day lives and backyards.

Importantly, having to do school online isn’t so much a revolution or cause for concern, it’s the everyday normal for thousands of children. The reaction to the closing schools brings into sharp focus the assumption that schooling is face-to-face when it is not for so many students in Australia. More so, it reminds us that rather than rural education constantly being framed as ‘disadvantaged’ it should in fact now be showcased as ‘world leading’.

This provides an opportunity to highlight a key equity issue beneath assumptions. Online learning can be as good as ‘real school’. It is for those communities, students and teachers for whom it is already their everyday reality.

We would like to acknowledge the knowledge and experiences shared with us by teachers and parents for whom this mode of learning is the day to day norm

For teachers wanting a little light moment in all of this. Here is Michael Bruening An associate professor of history and political science at Missouri University of Science and Technology, singing his ‘I will survive coronavirus version‘.