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Schooling Out of Place

Cathryn McConaghy*
University of New England, Australia
Education in rural communities is an interesting site for an analysis of the relationship between
place and the cultural politics of schooling. In particular the movements of people, ideas and
practices to and from, and also within, rural places suggest the need for theorizing on rural
education to consider the relevance of new mobility sociologies and displacement theories. Edward
Saids place theories provide an important political sensibility for retheorizing the relationship
between the geographies, mobilities, and subjectivities that comprise rural schooling. Drawing on
Saids analyses of displacement, discomfort, and pleasure as constitutive of social practices and his
elaboration of exilic identities as paradoxical, it is possible to reframe rural education dynamics,
particularly teacher mobilities, in new ways; not as natural aspects of globalization, but as linked to
the cultural politics of schooling in the contemporary era.
Place, Subjectivities, and Schooling
The concept of the rural in rural education is a marker of space and place in
schooling. Despite this, rural schooling is a field of educational policy and practice
that has been poorly theorized in terms of its place dynamics. Rethinking rural
education in terms of place theory has the potential to contribute to the application
and development of place theory in educational theorizing in general, i.e. with
reference to other places. Often viewed more as a historian*/of literature, Middle
Eastern politics and the cultural enterprises of imperialism*/Edward Saids theories
of subjectivities and place, or what he refers to as his critique of the practices of
imaginative geography (Said, 2000a, p. 199), are powerful tools for rethinking the
socio-spatial dynamics of schooling. With the help of Said and other place theorists
we are able to interrupt the notion that good schooling is without geography.
In this paper I consider the significance of place theory in general, and Saids
important contributions to this field, for rethinking the issue of displacements in
schooling, specifically rural teacher mobilities. Most Australian teachers begin their
teaching careers in rural schools, out of place, so to speak. In Queensland 87% of
new teachers begin their careers in rural schools (Roberts, 2005). They take up
postings to rural schools from their urban or coastal homes, most often only to
return as quickly as possible. Indeed, in one remote school the average length of stay
of teachers is 4.6 months; in others there is a 90% turnover of staff each 3 years.
*School of Education, University of New England, NSW 2351, Australia. Email:
cmcconag@une.edu.au
ISSN 0159-6306 (print)/ISSN 1469-3739 (online)/06/030325-15
# 2006 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/01596300600838777
Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education
Vol. 27, No. 3, September 2006, pp. 325339
Mapping the demographics of teacher mobilities and considering strategies for
preparing, attracting, retaining, and renewing teachers for rural schools is a project
currently underway within the New South Wales (NSW) Rural Teacher Education
Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Project (R[T]EP) (Green et al.,
forthcoming). What emerges from this cartographical work is a complex picture of
inward and outward movements, within and between regional transfers, post-baby
boomer retirements and leadership successions, challenges around the recruitment
of overseas trained teachers, centralized staffing decisions, accelerated career
progressions, teaching staff dichotomies, including a small youthful teaching staff
working alongside a generally ageing teaching force (the average age of teachers in
NSW is 49 years), problems of teacher sedentarism, and complex access politics in
terms of teacher professional learning. In addition, suggestions of a correlation
between teacher turnover and low student outcomes (McConaghy, 2002) have
meant that in the NSW schooling context the issue of teacher turnover has become
structurally linked to issues of schooling reform and schooling effectiveness within
state policy and research agendas.
Many educational authorities are concerned about the high rate of mobility of
teachers: high teacher turnover in certain places is considered a serious and costly
problem for the delivery of quality education and the achievement of student equity
outcomes. Rural student academic outcomes in general are lower than their urban
counterparts (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 2000). In
addition, complex social classing effects are argued as having spatial dimensions.
Luke (2003) argued, for example, that little is known of the spatialized poverties
produced within Australian schooling. As a consequence of the suggested link with
lower student outcomes and the formation of spatialized social class structures,
understanding the nature of teacher mobility and encouraging teacher continuity has
been the focus of considerable research, particularly in rural education. Rarely,
however, has this research been informed by place and mobility theory and rarely
have these displacements been viewed as paradoxical phenomena with both positive
and negative dimensions, i.e. there is the possibility that teacher mobilities may be
constitutive of innovative pedagogies, social relations, and practices in rural schools.
A rural school principal remarked that despite the high teacher turnover in her
school, rural schools create good teachers for the coast, referring to rural schools as
productive sites for teacher becoming and professional learning.
In working through the meaning of social dislocations over several decades of
writing, Said was able to convey the complexities of his experience of exile as both a
source of pain and pleasure. His work draws attention to the paradoxes associated
with displacement. Although it is necessary to recall that Said was observing a
particular social phenomenon, i.e. Palestinian exile, his analyses of the political
dimensions and paradoxes of displacement are more generally relevant. Hence, in
rethinking the dynamics associated with rural teacher mobilities we are alerted to the
need to consider the meaning of teacher displacements as other than a problem for
rural schooling. At the same time and linked to this, Saids insistence on the
centrality of politics as constitutive of social phenomena, including dispossession and
326 C. McConaghy
displacement, alerts us to the need to understand teacher mobilities as other than
natural social phenomena. If teacher movements are at the same time paradoxical
and political, what are the pleasures and pains of these displacements and what
interests and ideologies are at play in the process? If teacher mobilities are
constitutive of social relations and practices in schools, why is it that educational
theory so often begins with an assumption of the static school, the static teacher, and
the unitary and static classroom of students? How can educational theorizing and
schooling reform account for the fact that teaching and schooling so often occur out
of place?
Teaching and Learning Out of Place: Narratives and structures
In an interview in 1999 Edward Said (2000b, p. 419) discussed how in his memoir
Out of place (Said, 1999) he acknowledged the need to leave behind subjective
accounts of his experiences of exile. This can be read as a reminder that the
accounts of lived experience need to be read as a dialectic, with structural analysis.
Hence, in relation to an analysis of schooling dynamics in rural NSW, narrative
research (for example the Bush Tracks Project) sits alongside research of the socio-
spatial structures and dynamics of schooling (for example The NSW Rural Teacher
Education Project), both of which provide data and insights for the discussion that
follows.
There are a number of ways in which we can speak of rural schooling as schooling
out of place, other than in the sense that teachers relocate from their homes to rural
schools, remain there for short periods unsettled, and leave quickly. For example, the
term conveys the sense in which the type of schooling imagined in the metropolis
forms the core of policy and guidelines for practice in all schools, regardless of
location. Here the notion of out of place refers to a lack of geographic imagination, or
rather one that is metro-centric. In addition, the term alludes to the fact that rural
schools, particularly secondary schools, often have immense student catchment areas
(one rural secondary school in NSW has a catchment area of 10,000 km
2
, an area
equivalent to the size of Jamaica), with many children travelling up to 2 hours each
morning and afternoon to attend schools in places distant from home. In this context
the school bus is the major space for the formation of social relations among the
children. Teachers also travel vast distances to attend school each day. In times of
drought many country women enter teaching in order to obtain non-farming family
incomes, often travelling vast distances each day from the farm to school. Declining
school staff entitlements mean that teaching families often have to find employment
away from home. In one small region of western NSW 10 teaching couples live and
teach in separate communities and travel to meet up on weekends. Centralized
staffing appointments mean that there are some rural teachers who are unemployed
in rural towns or work part-time as emergency teachers, while teachers from the city
come and go.
Schooling Out of Place 327
In more remote areas of NSW there is an observable drain of clever boys from rural
schooling, with boys from middle-class families being sent to Sydney private schools,
the clever girls remaining behind to contribute to family stability and to skew the
statistics on gender performance in rural schools (where girls outperform boys). Here
gendered social dichotomies can be linked to the formation of exilic schooling
subjectivities. Public school bus policies in NSW country regions also allow children
to travel free of charge past public school gates to attend private schooling in other
rural locations. This is an aspect of rural market trends that includes a pull from
smaller communities to larger centres. Indeed, rural schooling is characterized by
public and private schooling dichotomies as much as its metropolitan and coastal
counterparts (New South Wales Public Education Council, 2005). In many rural
communities there is a dichotomy between white and black schools that mirrors the
private and public schooling divide, i.e. racial clustering is an increasing factor in
schooling enrolments in towns with more than one school.
These sociological, policy, and market effects also create social relations of
antagonism and alienation in rural schools. Long and continuous histories of
indigenous dispossession have resulted in complex indigenous student mobilities,
such as those that occur along rivers such as the Darling River catchment in western
NSW. In addition, there are shifting social class divisions in rural schoolyards,
previously between land owners and land workers, but more recently, as a result of
drought-related social accelerator effects, between those who receive government
income support and those who do not. Each of these mobility factors, many
associated with what has been described as rural social decline, contributes to the
production of rural schools as spaces in which both teachers and students are often
out of place, far from home, or located within complex and alienating social relations.
These examples of rural schooling antagonisms link to Saids (2000d, pp. 466/467)
use of Gramscis observation that social dissonances are spatialized or situated and
that geographies are unequal.
The complexities of these processes of unhoming, alienation and displacement in
the formation of rural schooling subjectivities and practices have received little
attention in the rush to address rural schooling inequities. Saids archive of place
writing provides a rich source for rethinking these complex dynamics. Following
Gregorys (2000) discussions of Saids place theories, there are numerous possibi-
lities for linking the theories of Edward Said to issues in rural education. His
elaboration of the mutually productive relationship between the metropolis and the
margins, his lifelong preoccupation with the exiled subject as a subject unhomed and
displaced, his insistence on the centrality of politics to social relations and cultural
productions, his distinction between landscape and territories, his notion of
geographies of truth, the idea that identities and ideas can be mapped, territorialized
and deterritorialized, his insistence on the significance of spatial as well as temporal
sensibilities, his methodologies for recovering the connections between biography
and place, his understanding, following Foucault, of the divisiveness of geography,
his elaboration of the relationship between visibility, subjectivity, and place, his
notion of places and spaces as theatres of power and knowledge, and his interest in
328 C. McConaghy
mapping the cultural topographies of social productions are all important insights for
rethinking the relationship between place, subjectivities, and schooling. Some of
Saids key place theories will be elaborated in discussions of place and schooling
below.
The Metropolis and the Regions: Theorizing teaching contrapuntally
Saids theories of place and subjectivities, as with his theories of culture and
imperialism in general, drew on a range of theorists before him. Drawing on Antonio
Gramscis notion of social conflicts as situated and Raymond Williams (1973) The
country and the city, Said (2000d) argued the need to consider cultural productions
not only in terms of their representational qualities, but also in terms of their
productions within contested social and political relations. Williams spatial theories
also contributed inspiration to two of Saids major spatial methodologies, i.e. his
arguments about the need to read not only with a historical sensibility but also a
geographical one and his method of reading contrapuntally. In the latter method the
idea of reading at the same time both point and counterpoint, i.e. the thing and its
other, the peripheries and the centres (Said, 2000d, p. 470), provides for the
possibility of strategic reversals and for the mapping of complex and uneven cultural
topographies into practice (Gregory, 2000, p. 328).
For example, Said (2000c) read Austins (1814/1966) Mansfield Park with
Kiplings (1966) Kim as a way of linking the privilege accrued by Fanny Prices
English family from their properties in Antigua with slave labour. If we are to read
teaching contrapuntally then there is the possibility of reading, for example, both the
explicit policy and the hidden practices, both the professional subjectivities and their
transgressive others, both teaching in the city and the country, each as aspects of
complex and uneven cultural topographies of practice. In identifying the specific
nature of the cultural productions known collectively as rural education, rarely
read contrapuntally with urban education, our analyses of rural education are
undertaken in isolation. As such, they fail to understand the production of (rural)
schooling objects as having taken place within the contested social and political
relations between the metropolis and the regions. Following Williams (1973) and
Said (2000d, p. 469), we are alerted to the possibility that contests over pedagogy are
linked to contests over territory. Rural education practices and the social stratifica-
tions they produce are theorized as singulars in a spatial sense, disconnected from the
processes taking place outside the rural, connected only to their own rural historical
origins. What is absent in our research on rural education is an analysis of the grids
that wire metropolitan circuits of action to their colonial/regional outposts
(Gregory, 2000, p. 327). Following Said, our readings of rural education so often
frame it as an isolated cultural practice and as such fail to understand its location
with the production of complex geographies of truth and relative privilege. Saids
geography presents spaces and places as ideological landscapes whose representa-
tions are entangled with both relations of power (Gregory, 2000, p. 335) and
Schooling Out of Place 329
complex hierarchies of advantage and disadvantage*/privilege produced in one place
forms an overlapping territory and intertwined history with a lack of privilege and
exploitation elsewhere (Said, 1993, p. 1).
Strategic Reversals: Rethinking place and mobilities in teaching
Although place sociologists such as Urry (2000) make convincing arguments for the
need to abandon the urban/rural divide as a conceptual tool for understanding the
accumulation of privilege and instead develop sociological analyses of regionalism
and its dynamics, Saids theorizing of the flows of privilege, power, and goods
between regions (metropolitan and other), their inter-relatedness, remains useful for
an understanding of regional flows of schooling and related social dynamics, both
within and between urban and rural regions. Central to Saids critique is the fantasy
of autonomy (Said, 2000a, p. 215). For those in the metropolis the rural is out
there and far from daily life, and the reverse is also true. But if we are all
interconnected, there also needs to be recognition that we are connected along
different planes of activity, rather than one topography commanded by a
geographical and historical vision locatable in a known centre of metropolitan
power (p. 214). Reading the activities of both the place and its other, the metropolis
and the country, is an aspect of the strategic reversals made possible by what Said
referred to as contrapuntal readings.
The idea of strategic reversals as an aspect of contrapuntal reading, reading the
thing and its other, is also useful for theorizing about education and teaching in
another sense. If we were to read rural teacher mobilities contrapuntally, what new
insights could emerge from reading mobility as other than a problem to be solved
through greater teacher continuity. How much impermanence*/and permanen-
ce*/should be tolerated? How can teacher transience be read otherwise?
Travelling Pedagogies
Alongside the R[T]EP research of the structural dynamics between teacher
demographics and schooling outcomes is another project that seeks to develop a
more intimate understanding of rural teacher journeys. The Bush Tracks Research
Collective at the University of New England is seeking to explore rural teaching
transitions*/across spaces and places and in terms of teacher professional learning
and personal journeys*/through narratives of everyday social relations in rural
schools and communities. The Bush Tracks project began with an understanding of
place and, importantly, of displacements as productive of social and political
dynamics in rural schools (Bush Tracks Research Collective, 2005). In viewing
place as productive of practices and displacement as constitutive of social and
political relations, the Bush Tracks project draws upon materialist place theorists
such as Lefebvre (1974) and de Certeau (1986) and displacement theorists such as
Said (1978, 1993, 2000a, 2000d, 2000e) and Clifford (1997). Central to the
330 C. McConaghy
research questions of the project are the relationships between places and practices
and mobilities and subjectivities in knowledge production and social relations within
rural schools.
The displacements, or the transitions of rural teachers across space and place, are
viewed as constitutive of new schooling objects, including theories and practices of
pedagogy (McConaghy, Lloyd, Hardy, & Jenkins, 2005) and leadership (Miller,
Paterson, & Graham, 2005). This is a notion of place and schooling that is different
to that advocated by place-based schooling proponents such as Gruenewald (2003),
who argued, on the one hand, for place as a factor of relevance for curriculum and
pedagogy and, on the other, for more attention to the environment in schooling.
Rather, Bush Tracks develops a notion of place as constitutive of schooling:
knowledge is not based in place in the sense that it is about place (content
knowledge of place), but rather is produced or generated within place (process
knowledge in place) (McConaghy et al., 2005, p. 22).
Following Bernstein (1996/2000), the Bush Tracks project has documented the
ways in which pedagogy and leadership practices are developed and educational
knowledge recontextualized in rural schools. Central to this production of knowledge
in rural schools are the processes of displacement. Gaps are produced between what
Bernstein called the singular knowledges (those knowledges that speak only to
themselves, such as state-mandated quality teaching models) and the regional
knowledges (those that are produced through the recontextualizing of singular
knowledges). These gaps are produced by displacement (spatial, symbolic) and are
the place of learning and new knowledge generation. Importantly, as Bernstein
(1996/2000) observed, these gaps between singular and regional knowledge provide
spaces for ideology and politics to play, i.e. in the movement from singulars to
regional knowledge there is contestation for resources and authority. The recontex-
tualizing principle involves choices and contestations in relation to which singulars
are to be selected, what knowledge within the singular is to be reintroduced and
related (Bernstein, 1996/2000, p. 9).
In the Bush Tracks interviews with rural teachers, the narrativizing of pedagogy
involved the narrativizing of both contestations over pedagogy and the resourcing of
pedagogy. Not the slick categories of intellectual quality, relevance and supportive
environment of the NSW Quality Teaching Model (State of New South Wales,
2003), rather there was, as an example, an insistence on the importance of
pedagogies that did not infantilize rural students and instead honoured their existing
skill base. For example, teachers described how they were developing pedagogies for
boys and the river bank that recognized that by the time they entered secondary
schools many boys could fix bore pumps and drive A$500,000 harvesters. In the gap
between the NSW Quality Teaching Model, the state-mandated pedagogy (produced
in the metropolis), and the boys and the river bank pedagogy (produced in the
regions) there is the place for ideology to play. Here, for example, narratives that
critique the feminization of the curriculum*/referring to Educating Rita (Russell,
1996) as a set text for rural students*/and claim that our conservatism is our
radicalism (referring to a rejection of secondary schooling aimed at university
Schooling Out of Place 331
entrance rather than work skills) were invoked by rural teachers and schooling
leaders. Also significant was a desire to encourage rural students to know the world
beyond rural places. In this sense schooling out of place refers to schooling as more
than local place. Here, as with Said, rural teachers can be said to be employing a
geographical imagination as the basis for rural schooling pedagogy and curriculum.
The gaps and contestations over educational knowledge and theory and the
challenges to one knowledge (the singular knowledge of the NSW Quality Teaching
Model) as it travels from one place to another provides an interesting example of
what Said referred to in his critique of travelling theory (Said, 1993). Drawing on
Georg Lukacs theory of reification, Said (2000e, p. 437) described the way that
theories could become domesticated, dehistoricized and assimilated in their
relocation. The NSW Quality Teaching Model is a domesticated and commodified
version of a much more radical approach to pedagogy from which it was developed.
It took 18 of the 20 elements of the productive pedagogy model developed in
Queensland by Lingard et al. (2002), which itself was a recontextualizing of the
model of authentic pedagogy developed by Newmann and Associates (1996) in the
USA. The NSW model is an example of Saids elaboration of the reification process
that occurs when theory travels, i.e. the original theory, produced in one place
becomes reified and domesticated, stripped of its radical potential when commodi-
fied, depoliticized, and distributed to other places. Within the processes of
reification, theory is in danger of becoming a kind of dogmatic orthodoxy (Said,
2000e, p. 437). In the same way that Lingard, Hayes, and Mills (2003) have
described the domestication of their model of Productive Pedagogies as it became
commodified by the state for distribution within Queensland schools, the same
process of deradicalization has occurred with the NSW Quality Teaching Model
within NSW schools. Here it sits in contestation with the recontextualized and
politicized pedagogical theories developed within rural schools.
However, in his revisiting of the critique of travelling theory Travelling theory
reconsidered (Said, 2000e), Said suggested that theories can also be reinvigorated
through their displacement. Before its commodification by the state, the Queensland
Productive Pedagogies model was a reinvigoration of the American Authentic
Pedagogies model for Queensland contexts. In similar ways, NSW rural schools are
reinvigorating the NSWQuality Teaching Model for their own purposes. This process
of local invention and reinvention, or producing pedagogies in place, has been
described elsewhere in relation to NSW rural schools as situating pedagogies
(McConaghy, 2002). In view of the need for a situated approach to teaching, the
challenge for teacher education was thought to be how to teach the skills by which
pedagogical knowledge could be recontextualized for new places and contexts, i.e.
how teachers could learn to situate their pedagogies within their particular contexts.
Here complex skills in socio-spatial analysis and the interpretation of social dynamics
for teaching were envisaged as core competencies. However, the Bush Tracks project
suggests that this process by which the singular knowledges of the state (and indeed the
university curriculum) are taken up and reinvented and reinvigorated is taking place in
rural teaching regardless of policy or professional learning interventions. Within a
332 C. McConaghy
context of surveillance, notably through the new NSW Institute of Teachers and the
Graduate Teaching Professional Standards, against which all beginning teachers will
be assessed, this situating of practice and knowledge is likely to be in some tension or
antagonism with state-mandated teacher knowledge. What is at issue here is the
geographic imagination, or the lack of a geographic sensibility, within the Institute.
Ruralism
The NSW Department of Education, in conjunction with several regional
universities, has a programme of rural teaching orientation for student teachers in
which they are taken on buses to remote schooling communities. Not part of a formal
practicum or assessment process, the Beyond the Line programme allows student
teachers to flirt with the possibilities of rural teaching (McConaghy & Bloomfield,
2004). What the teacher educators believe is happening is that student teachers are
testing out their fantasies of what remote, mainly indigenous, schools are really like.
Before the programme we ask students what they think they will encounter on their
visits*/major challenges, major innovations, implications for their own teacher
education, and so on*/and after their return we ask the same questions in terms of
what they experienced. Before they go they expect to see racism; when they return
they report seeing unruly (black) children. After the visits they ask to have more
behaviour management skills included in their courses. This slippage from racism to
unruly black children is interesting, and alerted one teacher education institution to
the need not for more behaviour management skills, but for more skills in
understanding the histories and consequences of colonialism in Australian rural
schooling to be included in their teacher education curriculum.
The fact that the programme exists at all is also interesting, and has been argued
elsewhere as an aspect of the construction of rural schools as uncanny places*/in a
Freudian sense (Freud, 1919/1953), strange yet familiar*/within education. Rural
schools are considered sites of wild imaginings, exotic peoples, violent behaviours,
isolation, and deprivation. Students report being pleasantly surprised by the well-
stocked computer laboratories of the schools and the good social life of teachers, and
frightened by the barbed wire fences and the poverty of the surrounding homes. On
one of the excursions the buses were organized to stop on the outward journey at a
monument to an indigenous massacre. A local guide explained something of the
violent history of the region. Teaching points were made of the legacies of this
violence, the fact that there were no indigenous families within several hundred
kilometres of the shrine, that all the schools and communities in the local area were
white, and how the shrine was connected to the ongoing social disadvantages of
indigenous communities dispossessed along the river communities further west. The
following year the massacre site visit was cancelled*/too much reality on this journey
of dreams and illusions.
Saids (1978, 1993, 2000a) detailed discussions of the formations of the Orient
within the discipline of Orientalism are useful for this discussion of the Beyond the
Schooling Out of Place 333
Line programme and the metro-centric nature of constructions of the rural
in education. Said (2000a, p. 199) described Orientalism as emerging from
the ideological suppositions, images and fantasies about a region, which are the
products of imaginative geographies. Among the challenges of Orientalism is
the muteness imposed upon the Orient as object (p. 202). As with Orientalism,
ruralism is the construction of fantasies about the rural other that both inscribe what
the rural must be and prevent it from speaking back. Policy, curriculum, and
pedagogy are ascribed for the rural by the metropolis; relevance in rural education is
an ideological supposition of what it could or should be. Thus the rural is
constructed within policy as a homogeneous entity, as somehow different to urban,
but with enough similarities of purpose to urban to bind both within meta-narratives
about good teaching and effective schooling that are context free.
The rural is represented by the term geographic isolation in NSW Department
of Education equity strategies. The notion of the rural as geographic isolation
erases the vast diversity of rural regions, including both their within and between
region diversities, in addition to presenting a simplistic reading of isolation and
assumptions about its impact on schooling. The R[T]EP analysis of rural schooling
and the sociological trends of regionalism within rural NSW present a complex
picture of within-region social stratifications (along gendered and racialized axes),
spatialized poverties, economic imbalances in flows between regions, drought
accelerator effects, ageing communities that are changing the face of school-
community relations, high levels of mental health issues, suicide and depression,
high rates of children taken into custody, and other socio-spatial dynamics that
impact unevenly on schooling and student outcomes in rural areas in ways that are
not simply reduced to factors of remoteness, i.e. complex social dynamics (other than
remoteness) exist within rural regions that impact unevenly on schooling. Rural
disadvantage is a complex phenomenon involving both in-school and out-of-school
factors that cannot be captured adequately by the simplistic notion of geographic
isolation. In addition, geographic isolation emerges as the only marker of place
disadvantage in the equity data. Absent is an analysis of other spatialized inequities
within the state (declining coastal steel manufacturing towns, belts of urban poverty,
and so on). Here place disadvantage is conceptualized simplistically as geographic
remoteness. As with Orientalisms imagined geographies, the reductionism that
equates rurality with emptiness and isolation is an aspect of ruralisms erasures. In
erasing the significance of place what is also erased are the processes by which
geographies become unequal.
The Politics of Displacement and Schooling
For rural sociologists such as Urry (2000) and others flows of people across space
and place are increasingly a characteristic of contemporary times, i.e. mobilities, they
argue, are increasingly a social phenomenon associated with new globalizing
conditions. Geophilosophers such as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) argued that place
334 C. McConaghy
and mobility are essential aspects of being in the world. Becomings are not so much
historical as geographical; our subjectivities are matters of lines of flight or entries
and exit within and across space. Hence, new mobility sociologies suggest that
transience is a natural social phenomenon, rather than an abhorrent one, while place
theorists argue that being and acting in the world, ourselves, and our practices are
foremost place matters. Following the mobility theorists and geophilosophers, we
could ask: How can we think geographically or spatially about social phenomena,
including teaching, and in what ways are the formations of teaching subjectivities
linked to the cultural topographies of schooling? What are the relationships between
place, mobilities, and teaching subjectivities? Importantly, what provokes a line of
teacher flight (McConaghy, 2005)? If the mobility sociologists are correct in inferring
that increasing teacher mobility is a natural social phenomenon that parallels
increasing mobilities within the community in general, what does this say of the limits
of politics as an intervention in displacement? What, other than politics, could be
taking place?
Following Gregory (2000, p. 313), one of the major criticisms of Saids place
theory is his failure to adequately account for the non-political, or rather his
insistence that everything is political. The absence of topographies of desire in Saids
work, for example, has been taken up by Bhabha (1994, p. 72) and others. More
interested in the politics of space than the psychoanalytics of space, Said is charged
with being unable to account for the relationship between anxiety, desire, and fantasy
in the production of space. These aspects of rural teaching, the libidinal economies of
rural teaching, have been identified elsewhere (McConaghy & Bloomfield, 2004) as
central to an understanding of the production of rural teaching spaces. The rural
emerges as an uncanny site for the production of anxieties about the white presence
in post-colonial Australia. However, these anxieties, the affective states, are also
political. As Britzman (1998) argued, what is required in an analysis of the cultural
politics of rural teaching is attention to both internal (psychic) and the external
(socio-political) conflicts and the dialectic between them. Following Bhabha (1994,
p. 72), we could ask where is the scene of desire in relation to rural teacher
mobilities? Central to these economies of anxiety, desire, and fear around unhoming
and dislocation are issues of loss.
Consolations, Creativities, and Losses
In his book Darwins worms Adam Phillips (1999) explored Darwins and Freuds
interest in the idea of natural loss. Put differently, Phillips argued, asking what loss is
natural gives rise to important questions about the limits to politics. Asking what
alienation and displacement are natural gives rise to important questions about the
extent to which being unhomed or unhoming the self is connected to political
processes. If we are to believe the mobility theorists such as Urry (2000), dislocation
is a natural phenomenon of the 21st century. In rethinking impermanence and loss as
linked to the limits of politics one wonders about the degree to which policy
Schooling Out of Place 335
interventions can ever stem the flow*/of refugees across borders, of teachers across
schooling regions. Given that elsewhere we have argued that significant new
knowledge is generated in the recontextualizing of knowledge that accompanies
relocation and displacement, one begins to ask in relation to teacher journeys should
we try (McConaghy, 2005)? However, as Said would have insisted, displacement has
important political dimensions: assessing whether the productivities and creativities
of exile, unhoming, and displacement outweigh the losses is a dangerous activity.
Rather than a balancing act of how much loss is good for us, the more pertinent issue
is how is one consoled to loss? In what ways can we conceive of rural pedagogies and
practices as consolations to loss (McConaghy, 2006)?
Said (2000f) has written of his lived experiences of exile that its essential sadness
can never be surmounted (p. 173). There is a rich body of research linking the
losses associated with exile, in addition to arguments about the creative processes
that exile so often spurns (Bayoumi & Rubin, 2000, p. xv). Indeed, Said also
elaborated the pleasures of exile in terms of the creative and intellectual work of
the exile. Is this intellectual and creative work a form of consolation for losses? As
Said (2000f, p. 173) explained, the achievements of exile are permanently
undermined by the loss of something left behind forever. Care is required here in
relation to slippages between the state of Palestinian exile (about which Said wrote
extensively) and the experiences of teacher mobilities. However, what links the exile
with the rural teacher from the city is an ambivalence about what has been left
behind and a reluctance to be where one is. Indeed, Said linked his analysis of the
experiences of exile to his observations that we live in an age of anxiety and
estrangement, of the refugee, the displaced person, mass immigration (Said,
2000f, pp. 173/174). Teachers who are ambivalent about living in rural towns but
who feel they must as a requirement of having a teaching career, as an aspect of
developing the worldliness (Said, 2000g, p. 565) of the teacher, share something in
common with the reluctant immigrant.
Saids (2000d, p. 473) theorizing, following Lukacs and Gramsci, in relation to the
dissonances of modern life are provocative in this regard. In the interviews with rural
teachers undertaken for the Bush Tracks Project the force of feelings of estrangement
and the sense of melancholy and displacement of many rural teachers was evident. It
is possible to view their emergent pedagogies as providing consolations for their
losses in teaching and living out of place. For example, a closet lesbian teacher in a
small one-teacher school, Meg, used humour in both her teaching and her life in the
community as a way to regulate her social connections and protect her from
vilification. Humour as pedagogy, as a regulator of the intimacies in rural teaching,
was a consolation for her losses in a heteronormative community. Her life in the
small community was dichotomous with her life in the small school cluster of which
she was a member and the social life she experienced in the lesbian community of the
regional city four hours drive away. She lived in multiple communities, moving
carefully between them, and developed multiple scripts for successful teaching and
living. In an insightful analysis of Freuds ambivalent Jewish identity, Said (2003,
p. 54) wrote of the inherent limits that prevent it from being incorporated into one,
336 C. McConaghy
and only one, Identity. As one of the teachers in the Bush Tracks interviews said,
There is more to me than being a teacher. Although achieving many successes with
her students, Meg described a sense of constant estrangement in the town and
recognized that her stay there would be limited. She was not socially isolated in the
community, rather her high visibility as a non-gender-conforming woman meant that
she had to develop strategies for regulating her visibility and dealing with the
anxieties of close associations. Remote communities are sites of intense politics of
association and dissociation (following Sorkin, 1999), complex invisibilities and
hypervisibilities (following Ang, 1996), and slippery states of insiderism and
outsiderism (Said, 2000d, p. 472) that the term isolated fails to capture.
Edward Saids (2000f) identification of the losses associated with displacement are
relevant to this discussion of rural teaching. Unhomed, neither here nor back there,
the exiled self is located paradoxically, i.e. a paradoxical identity is associated with
such displacements and in this process a richer, more complex (teaching) self
emerges. Exile is a jealous state argued Said (2000f, p. 178) and an exile is always
out of place (p. 180). Indeed, most rural teachers begin arranging their transfers out
as soon as they arrive, anticipating the pleasures of a real school and social
connections back on the coast. Many times I have heard of a teacher finally obtaining
a transfer out only to feel ambivalent about going. What types of schooling are
produced in this state of ambivalence*/of feeling neither here nor there, unhomed
and out of rhythm? Said described the life of exile as moving according to a different
calendar, as outside habitual order: It is nomadic, decentred, contrapuntal; but
no sooner does one get accustomed to it than its unsettling force erupts anew
(2000a, p. 186).
Far from being natural social phenomena, Said argued that exile, unhoming and
displacement are more often the outcome of political processes. Following Saids
theorizing of exile, James Cliffords (1997) book Routes continued with the theme of
theorizing journeys and social movements of displacement. Clifford asked what
happens when we begin with an assumption about human activity as constituted by
displacement as much as by stasis (p. 2)? The practices of displacement, he argued,
emerge as constitutive of cultural meanings rather than as their simple transfer or
extensions (p. 3). This links to Saids (2000h) critique of travelling theory. One
cannot simply transfer or extend knowledge from one place to another without
change taking place. Hence, we are led to ask in what ways do teacher journeys and
movements constitute meanings about teaching? What new knowledges and new
subjectivities are generated in the practices of teacher displacement (McConaghy,
2005)?
Saids theories of place and displacement present a radically different interpreta-
tion of mobilities, not as natural social phenomena but as the result of imperialisms
and metrocentrisms linked spatially as much as temporally. Lines of flight are the
result of cultural and other political processes. Politics determines where student
teachers undertake their teacher education (where teacher education institutions are
located) and where they will begin their careers (complex transfer schemes require
teachers to have accumulated teaching points before being able to transfer to coastal
Schooling Out of Place 337
and urban schools). If Saids legacy is primarily political (Bilgrami, 2004, p. ix), his
most important contribution to an analysis of schooling out of place will be for us to
identify the ways in which rural schooling disadvantages and teacher mobilities are
inherently political social phenomena.
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