When UNSW student teacher Danielle Barisa drove over the Blue Mountains and beyond the Bathurst Plains to Coonabarabran in 2016, it was the first time she had really ventured west. Besides a Mudgee farmstay in her childhood, her life had been spent on the Central Coast. The interior of NSW was a mystery to the then 23-year-old.

Barisa admits to a sense of trepidation taking up the offer to do the final practicum of her Education (Masters) at Coonabarabran High School, about seven hours’ drive from Sydney.  “Everyone was kind of warning me against it, but I tried not to think about it ... I treated it as a new opportunity and just went for it,” she says.

Her displacement from life in Sydney’s Dulwich Hill was symbolised by her arrival in the town of 3,000 people. “The guy [I was hiring a car from] knew I was coming out to the country and said, ‘I know you’re going out to the country so I thought I’d pick a special car’ and I’m thinking this is going to be great and I get to the hire place and the car’s hot pink,” she recalls.

“Everyone in Coonabarabran certainly knew when I arrived. I was this blonde thing with a hot pink car.  I must have looked like such an idiot – I definitely made a statement, that’s for sure.”

Barisa now calls Coonabarabran home, has found love with a local farmer and secured a year-long position as a teacher at the local high school.

Barisa’s story represents a case of ‘mission accomplished’ for Head of the School of Education at UNSW Sydney Professor Chris Davison, the NSW Department of Education’s Executive Director Learning and Business Systems Cheryl Best, and her colleague Diane Wasson.

The three educators are behind a partnership that aims to address difficulties in attracting teachers to work in regional, rural and remote NSW. Despite scholarship programs and incentive packages, there are still more than 200 teacher vacancies in 150 rural and remote NSW public schools.

In early 2016 Wasson and her colleagues began thinking how they could use student teacher placements to foster interest in working in rural and remote schools. “Under the Professional Experience Agreements with NSW initial teacher education providers, the Department has about 1,850 schools taking teacher education placements from various [tertiary institutions] but we wanted to undertake a special process to get teacher education students from metropolitan universities out into rural and regional area,” Wasson says.

It provides our students with a bridging experience before they are on their own ... and they can be a bit more innovative because it is the end of the year and most of the syllabus has been ticked off.

When she began raising the idea of rural and remote placements at Sydney’s universities, UNSW’s Davison quickly saw the potential. In collaboration with regional education department executives, Coonabarabran High was selected as the pilot school.

Under the scheme student teachers are placed at the school for nine weeks at the end of the final school term. For the first five weeks they are closely supervised but once they meet the required standard they spend the last four weeks managing a classroom on their own, with intermittent support and guidance.

Davison says this is a key to the program’s success: “It provides our students with a bridging experience before they are on their own ... and they can be a bit more innovative because it is the end of the year and most of the syllabus has been ticked off,” she says.

Wasson says the length of the placement allows the student teachers to really experience what a teaching career would be like. “They are moving from a position of being a teacher education student to almost being a teacher,” she says.

Conversely the schools get a first look at new graduates “and if they like what they see they can offer them a placement” – which is what happened for UNSW graduate Barisa.

Coonabarabran High School deputy principal Mary Doolan, who mentored Barisa during her placement, says the program not only gives the intern a sense of what it is like to live in a rural community, staff and students benefit from having some “young blood” in the classroom. 

“The [student teachers] are enthusiastic and right on top of pedagogy and are ready to try new approaches to teaching and learning, so it re-energises staff in their own pedagogy,” Doolan says.

Davison is not surprised by that view: “It’s the whole reciprocal teaching process that is energising – it’s triggered by experienced teachers being challenged and questioned to explain why they are doing what they are doing. I think it has a particular impact in the country because country teachers don’t always get the same professional learning opportunities as city teachers.”

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It's a long way from UNSW to Coonabarabran, but student teachers have found their rural placement life changing. Photo: Supplied

Davison’s commitment extends to being UNSW’s supervising academic for the rural and remote schools where students are placed.

“I feel we have a particular responsibility to ensure those placements work to their very best and everybody achieves what they want to achieve from them,” Davison says.

She would also like to see a mandatory rural practicum included in the new Primary Teaching degree which will be launched at UNSW in 2018.

The placement scheme is gaining momentum. From the 2016 intake of three interns in one school, in 2017 nine students were placed in four rural and remote schools: Coonabarabran, Lightning Ridge, Wade and Griffith high schools.

Joanna Tan was among the 2017 interns who took up the offer to experience a teaching career outside Sydney and travelled to Coonabarabran. “I wasn’t sure what it would be like and it was a good opportunity for me to see. It wasn’t what I was expecting. The challenges are different and it has forced me to grow a lot and evaluate the way I teach,” says Tan.   

Fellow 2017 intern Russell Willoughby taught science and senior biology at Wade High School in Griffith. Willoughby also saw the rural placement as an opportunity to gain experiences he wouldn’t get in a metropolitan school. 

“I was still trying to discover what my teaching philosophy was and I thought that a rural placement would help me determine what sort of school I would like to work in, as my first practicum was at an independent school on the north shore of Sydney,” he says.

The experience has been life-altering for both. Tan has been offered a contract position at Coonabarabran for 2018 as part of a new middle school program, and Willoughby is rethinking his career ambitions.

“I would say it has changed my perspective. Originally, I was participating in the rural program for my own gain and I wasn’t planning to work in such a location. But it’s a great place to live, the people are great and the students really rely on school as a social, mental and emotional support,” he says.

“As teachers we have a big responsibility and impact on these students. Now I would love to work in a similar location.”