Perceptions of Educational Opportunities in Small Schools in Rural Australia and Canada
Abstract Australia and Canada are large countries with small populations relative to their size, in which a not inconsiderable number of citizens live beyond major centres of population. In both resource-based economies, the provision of quality education in rural schools is an important part of the national social and economic infrastructure. This article draws attention to post-compulsory educational opportunities, firstly as an issue for rural students in Australia, and, based on Australian research, its relevance for Canadian young people. Secondly, attention is directed to the realities of rural schools for urban university students and ways that the schools and a university teacher education program can be linked through past and current students of the faculty. Rural students considering urban education and urban teachers considering rural schools are both engaged in building new realities based on perceptions of non-local worlds.
Australian Developments in Distance Education and Their Implications for Rural Schools
Distance education has for many yearsplayed an important role in the delivery of education to rural parts of Australia. Recentdevelopments in information and communicationtechnologies, together with the advent of federally funded open learning at the tertiary level, arechallenging traditional notions of distance education in Australia. These developments have many implications for Australian ruraleducators who must now consider their applications forteachers and learners in remote parts of the country. Traditionally, rural and distance education have been seen as the provision of schooling for people who live in isolated areas. With changes in communication technologies, however, distance education is perhaps now inappropriately named; "tele-education" more accurately describes it in the late 20th century.' In Australia, open learning­ has received commonwealth approval at the ter­ tiary level and is likely to become an increasingly popular way of delivering education for the rest of this decade, particularly to non-urban areas of the country. Distance education in Australia has always been paper-based, characterised by heavy depen­ dence on postal deliveries of correspondence courses. Although many distance education courses are likely to continue along these lines, new electronic forms of delivery of education to students are currently being examined and evalu­ ated. In the process, distance education in Aus­ tralia is undergoing a transformation and, with this, the notion of isolation is being reconsidered. Changes in modes of delivery of distance educa­ tion in Australia are likely to challenge the very notion of rural education. Some of the more significant developments in contemporary distance education in Australia in­ clude (a) the use of new communication technologies, particularly computers, electronic mail (e-mail), and faxes; (b) changes in the concept of Distance Education Centres (DECs) and the advent of open learning; and (c) the conceptof inter-institutional networking. These should be considered in relation to social and economic changes in Australia that are providing current developments in distance education with added significance: the rate of unemployment, currently estimated to be over one million people; the need to be competitive in international trade, particularly in relation to certain Asian econo­ mies; and the desire to strengthen industry-school relations. For rural communities, there is the ever-present
Beyond the Cities: Expanding the Sense of Option among Rural Adolescents.
Designing and evaluating curriculum that focuses on rural women is a complex enterprise. Little research has been done on the specific needs of this population, although there is a general consensus among those who work with rural women (young and adult) that their needs are many and unmet. Further, few courses of study have been developed for rural women (or indeed, for rural students in general), leaving the curriculum designer without models to follow or previous evaluations from which to learn. Finally, rural schools feel no particular obligation to serve as curriculum test sites and want little to do with anything that smacks of "Women's Lib." Thus, development of a curriculum for rural women must be done, for the most part, on the basis of experience, intuition, needs assessment, formative evaluation, and prayer. In our development and evaluation of "Options: A Career Development Curriculum for Rural High School Students," we relied on all of those resources. The Options Project, funded by a grant from the Women's Educational Equity Act Program of the U.S. Office of Education, was a two-year curriculum research and development program based at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. We took on the task of designing a relatively brief course (9-1 2 weeks) that would help to prepare rural high-school students, especially young women, to deal with problems they were likely to meet as they entered the world of family life and of work. A description of this curriculum-its development and An earlier version of this article was presented at a meeting of the Evaluation Research