Chad Morrison PhD

The papers presented in this issue gravitate around notions of community within rural, regional and remote education. These concepts of community are not new to us in education, particularly those of us with an interest in the teaching and learning that happens beyond the city limits. This concept is not new to our readership either, having already devoted attention to community in an earlier issue in 2020 and across the journal’s significant history. What these papers offer here is new perspectives on the priorities being pursued, the programs being developed and the opportunities arising from engaging community in all aspects of rural teaching and learning.

Welcome to the third issue of AIJRE for 2019. This collection of papers from regional, rural and remote (RRR) Australia, Nigeria, Scotland and the United States provides an important dialogue with diverse perspectives about the connections that sustain RRR communities. The body of work brought together here offers the perspectives of learners, teachers, leaders, administrators, researchers and community members.

The medium for sharing concerns, offering solutions and celebrating achievements is their perspectives of lived experience. These researchers have relied upon an interpretive approach to utilise a range of methodological and theoretical lenses to examine their contexts and explore understandings that have been created within complex social networks. The perspectives collected communicate the value of connection between institutions, networks, resources and knowledge. Within these perspectives there is also concern about the inequitable access to those very same elements. These realities are not new to these communities, to the researchers nor to our broad learning community interested in confronting them; however, the perspectives offered here provide cause for attention and in some instances optimism. Consequently, it is exciting to present these papers as snapshots of perspective along a continuum of experience across the RRR landscape.

The perspectives shared within this issue include ways of engaging vulnerable students as they make their way through tertiary study in regional contexts through to priorities for preparing the next generation of teachers for RRR contexts. They include the voices of administrators grappling with implementation of urban-centric priorities and teachers' perspectives on how to re-orientate professional learning around local concerns. Other perspectives emphasise reasons to celebrate localised pedagogy, curriculum and practice. The connections evident within these papers emphasise what is valued and valuable. As a result, these connections act like threads between the papers and between these RRR communities separated by great distance, cultural contexts and lived realities. The communities and cohorts presented here are looking to strengthen the ways that connections mitigate the challenges of distance and enhance the opportunities to thrive as a result of them. Each contribution provides insights into the important work going on in these communities and offers invaluable perspectives to further each conversation.