TERRAnova: renewing Teacher Education for Rural and Regional Australia. Volume 1: Project Report

The main objective of the project that we have come to know as TERRAnova was to identify the nature of successful teacher education, recruitment and retention strategies aimed at making rural teaching an attractive and long-term career option for teachers. Funded by the Australian Research Council Discovery program, over 2008-2010, our aim was to identify and develop new knowledge that can inform pre-service teacher education, recruitment and retention strategies in systems around the nation. Staffing rural schools is an issue of continued and longstanding concern for State education departments both around Australia (Hatton et al., 1991;, Vinson, 2002; Roberts, 2004; Green & Reid, 2004), and overseas (Smith Davis, 2002; Allen, 2003). This project set out to discover the nature of successful strategies for preparing, attracting and retaining high-quality teachers for rural and remote schools in six Australian states. Our inquiry has found much that is indeed successful, along with reports from participants, some that is not ' and we present our findings in this two volume Report. Volume One is structured into two Sections, as described below, while Volume Two presents the full set of twenty Case Studies of rural communities and schools which have managed to 'keep their teachers' over time.