This paper presents an analysis of Asia-Pacific international school web pages, and explores the expressed purposes of schooling, with regard to the kinds of students/subjects that the schools purport to produce. Using the concept of globalization as a 'master' analytical frame, it is argued that despite claims to offering students unique experiences, international school web pages reproduce similar discourses in the construction of the student as an individual, member of a community and world-changing global citizen. Importantly, it is argued that while such discourses are often contradictory, this is nowhere more exemplified than in the claims to produce global citizens.

Rural teaching is a phenomenon often characterised by transitions: transitions from urban or regional universities to rural communities, between rural teaching posts and others, and from classroom teaching to leadership responsibilities. In the last century many Australian teachers have begun their careers, that is, they have undertaken the transition from student teacher to beginning teacher, in a rural school. Rural teacher mobility is a phenomenon that has been well documented over many decades and the impacts in terms of staffing dilemmas are the focus of strategic policy reforms in most Australian states. Usually perceived as a problem for education, particularly in times of rural teacher shortages and leadership succession crises, the Bush Tracks Research Collective is seeking to understand the nature of rural teaching transitions in new ways. Through a research collaboration between educational researchers and rural teachers, central to our focus is an understanding of how people become good rural teachers, specifically, how they learn rural pedagogies and rural leadership strategies. This paper presents a preliminary analysis of our surveys and case studies of the transitional experiences of rural teachers.

The academic and social achievements of students in rural schools are very unevenand often absenteeism and suspension rates are high. Factors such as globalisation,economic restructuring, unemployment, youth suicide and family trauma, drought andenvironmental change (see Bourke & Lockie 2001) also impact on rural schoolingand add further challenges to good teaching and learning in rural schools. As complexprocesses involving cognitive, contextual and affective understandings, ruralpedagogies need to be situated within rural contexts (McConaghy & Burnett 2002).How do rural teachers respond to the challenges in rural communities and schools thatmake quality learning for all students a difficult task? What pedagogies do beginningrural teachers use, why and with what effects? What images do beginning teachershave of 'the good teacher' and 'the good student' in rural schools and what are theobstacles to becoming these? What professional learning communities are available tobeginning teachers in rural schools, and how effective are they in supportingbeginning teachers to work through their identity issues and pedagogical challenges?Our case study and survey data provides valuable information about the livedexperiences of rural teachers in relation to their journeys in pedagogy for teacherprofessional learning programs.

Rethinking graduate teachers in rural schools as becomings in place allows different explorations of the issues surrounding teachers in rural schools. In the past studies of rural teaching have often focussed on the short length of stay of teachers in rural schools and have presented this mobility of rural teachers as problematic. The rural has often been depicted as both other and uncomfortable, and teachers appointed to rural schools have been viewed as temporary visitors. Phenomenologies of place enable us to conceive of teachers in rural places as part of those places; as sensing, corporeal bodies, who experience place and all it contains (human and non-human, animate and inanimate), and whose sense of place is influenced by the experience of both other individuals and the collective practices in place. The perspective of Deleuzo-Guattarian rhizomatics enables a shift from the individuated subject of self (a teacher) and place (rurality) to imagining a becoming-teacher—a multiplicity which is part of a teacherplace assemblage. While rhizomatics has a tendency to ignore the physical body, representing it in abstractions, phenomenology insists on the corporeal. This thesis juxtaposes these competing yet complementary notions of the body in place to explore the nature of the relation between place and becoming through conceptions of graduate teachers as both (i) sensing, corporeal bodies which are a part of place, and (ii) becomings which are a part of teacher-place assemblages. Using an arts-based methodology in the collection, analysis and representation of graduate teachers’ descriptions of their lived experiences, this research aims to produce different knowledges of rural teaching.

This book introduces Gottfried's Mergner's social and educational theory to non-German readers for the first time. Following Marcel van der Linden's introduction, which maps the major influences on and themes in Mergner's work, the anthology presents a collection of Mergner's publications in non-chronological order. The anthology begins and ends with Mergner's latest publications, both of which present his 'theory of the social limits to learning'. The intervening chapters are a collection of historical and current case studies, philosophical reflections and critical commentaries.