Dry stone walls, black stumps and the mobilisation of professional learning: Rural places and spaces and teachers’ self-study strategies in Ireland and Australia

In very different ways, dry stone walls and black stumps evoke sets of images and meanings ascribed to living in the rural areas of Ireland and Australia respectively. For the purposes of this chapter, they highlight as well the challenges and opportunities in professional learning encountered by teachers working in rural educational settings. To be successful, these teachers need to engage in effective self-study calibrated to the distinctive contexts of their work. Yet we argue that self-study must also take account of the politicised character of the places and spaces of current rural life. Throughout, our purpose is to examine how this then speaks back to a teacher education constituency against the backdrop of wider socioeconomic developments helping to frame the work of teachers and teacher educators in both countries. Deploying a comparative, exploratory case study research design, the chapter analyzes selected critical self-reflections of teachers in rural educational settings in Ireland and Australia. Data are generated through the three authors’ collaborative autoethnographic accounts of their own respective rural teaching experiences. The analysis is framed by the French theorist Michel de Certeau’s enduringly significant distinction between places and spaces. The key finding is both the need for, and the potential diversity of, rural teachers’ successful self-study strategies if their professional learning is to be sustainable and possibly transformative for themselves, their students and their communities.