Author: Elizabeth Mann
Mann, Elizabeth, 2025 Surviving or Thriving: Early Career Teachers’ Stories of Work and Life in Rural Australia., Flinders University, College of Education, Psychology and Social Work
Terms of Use: This electronic version is (or will be) made publicly available by Flinders University in accordance with its open access policy for student theses. Copyright in this thesis remains with the author. You may use this material for uses permitted under the Copyright Act 1968. If you are the owner of any included third party copyright material and/or you believe that any material has been made available without permission of the copyright owner please contact copyright@flinders.edu.au with the details.
The Australian teaching profession is currently facing a number of challenges. Heavy workloads, limited appreciation for teachers’ work, low morale, stress, and burnout are impacting their wellbeing. In rural, regional, and remote Australia, issues centre around a shortage of qualified teachers in certain geographical regions and subject areas, access to quality professional development, as well as equitable funding and resources vary across schools and regions. Despite the government incentives and motivation to teach in rural, regional, and remote areas, attracting, recruiting, and retaining early career teachers, especially to these areas, remains a challenge for an already stretched teacher workforce.
Although Australian research has focused on early career teachers and rural, regional, and remote teaching, there is a need to update the longitudinal qualitative research in this area. Early career teachers’ voices are integral in the broader conversation surrounding rural, regional, and remote education and in times of increasing demands on teachers. To address this gap, this research aimed to explore and understand the factors that influenced early career teachers as they reflected on their experiences of work and life during one school year in rural, regional, and remote Australia.
Framed by Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological theory and Process-Person-Context-Time (PPCT) model (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006), this longitudinal qualitative research afforded the rich detailed exploration of six early career teachers’ experiences and interactions in their context. From the semi-structured interviews gathered in Terms 1 and 4 of a school year, research portraits, shaped from the early career teachers’ words, capture the compelling idiosyncratic stories of each early career teacher’s rural, regional, and remote experiences. Themes generated from reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) and analysed across the layers of the bioecological theoretical framework, were crafted into research poems, encompassing the holistic essence across all of the early career teachers’ rich meaningful experiences.
Findings from this research revealed that early career teachers’ personal characteristics (their unique resources and dispositions) and interactions with, and between, their contextual systems (micro-, meso-, exo-, and macrosystem) influenced their development and experiences in rural, regional, and remote Australia during one school year. The early career teachers’ stories highlighted the many complex and interrelated factors that enabled some to thrive and flourish, while others experience challenges and survive. This research contributes resonant nuanced insights and comprehensive understanding of early career teachers’ experiences, development, and growth across four states in rural, regional, and remote Australia during one school year, the holistic support they needed to survive and thrive in their work and life in these areas, as well as communicating their voice through portraits and poems for audiences to access, understand, and connect with their experiences.
As the teaching profession is complex and challenging, there isn’t any quick fix regarding attraction, recruitment, and retention of early career teachers to rural, regional, and remote areas. However, this research offers experiential insights for educational stakeholders to better select, support, and sustain early career teachers working and living in rural, regional, and remote Australia.
Keywords: early career teachers, beginning teachers, graduate teachers, experienced teachers, neophyte teachers, new teachers, rural, regional, remote, bush, country, Australia, wellbeing, well-being, surviving, thriving, flourishing, poetry, poem, stories, working, living, research poems, research portraits, portraiture, Bronfenbrenner, bioecological,
Subject: Education thesis
Thesis type: Professional Doctorate
Completed: 2025
School: College of Education, Psychology and Social Work
Supervisor: Associate Professor Kerry Bissaker