This is probably one of the last “story so far” posts I will do around research projects, but this one should not be excluded! I think tomorrow or over the weekend I might attempt to talk about my PhD! Yikes! This project is somewhat of a long story though, and I’m fuzzy on some of the details.

Every year the National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education (NCSEHE) offered grants for various projects the will improve equity. Either their website hasn’t been updated or the grants ceased in 2021, unsure! Anyway, in either 2019 or 2020 they had specific themes and I noted that a project around enabling students would be really appropriate. I was still at FedUni but as I had been consistently searching for more stable/ongoing work I had a contact at Monash University, Kirsten Reimer and (again from job seeking efforts) Ann-Marie Priest at CQU. So I contacted them and before I knew it I had a little team of people interested in a multi-university grant application.

We had 3 or 4 meetings to discuss it and surprisingly found we were all on the same page! At that point I invited my supervisor to join. We ended up with a team of 9 academics and an unsuccessful grant application. I was not too disappointed when we didn’t get the grant because I had expanded my professional network and learnt a LOT about the grant application process. That was the highlight. The “lowlight” was when I was told that as I was only a sessional (casual) staff member I could not have my name on the grant application. However, if we had got the grant I would have been employed as a Research Assistant (RA) so I could have put that on my resume instead of “grant recipient”.

Dr. Tim Fish was one of the Monash academics on that grant team and almost as soon as we knew we did not get the grant I contacted Tim and asked if he would work with me on another project because we were both passionate about regional and remote students. Well that was the beginning of something I never could have predicted!

He was part of a team with Richard O’Donnovan and Ondine Bradbury. In fact, they had already got ethics approval and were just about to start interviewing students! I was well and truly late to the party! But I was keen and had plenty of spare time. I also told Tim straight up that I was happy to be last author on anything and everything because I really just wanted to learn and be part of the research process.

So with Tim’s guidance I conducted some of the interviews and did my share of transcribing as well. We had students from Monash and Deakin that had done their teacher placements in rural locations. We have divided them into 3 groups, rural students doing rural placements in Victoria, metropolitan students doing rural placements in Victoria and students that went to the Northern Territory to do a rural placement. The NT group were quite different as they went interstate and also experienced much higher rates of Indigenous students. So we asked them all about their experience of a rural placement, their motivations and of course if they intended to work in a rural location when they graduated.

Cutting a long story short, the rural students wanted to stay in rural schools when they graduated. The metropolitan students were not against the idea of teaching in a rural school but it was usually considered something for later in their careers. I’m not convinced that many of the metropolitan students really understood what it is like to live and work in a rural environment. It’s not just cows looking over you, yes I am referring to the image! Government have put a lot of funding and incentives out there, attempting to lure teachers to rural areas that are hard to staff. But our findings certainly suggest that they would be better to take the rural population and offer them local opportunities to study education because it is likely that they will stay and teach in their rural location once they graduate.

This project sort of snowballed when Richard gained access to some data from the Department of Education. So we have one article submitted and awaiting review at the moment. Then another 3 planned!!! All at various stages of completion! A little crazy I guess but this hasn’t happened in 5 minutes, it has been well over a year. We have fortnightly meetings that are always a laugh, such a great team.