ISFIRE themes

The ISFIRE symposium is organised around eight themes. Papers are encouraged that address issues, and present innovative solutions, within these themes. Possible issues for each theme follow.

1. Promoting Rural Policy Initiatives

• Developing government policies for successful rural education
• Measuring the impact of rural policy initiatives
• Facilitating and strengthening collaboration between governments, agencies and communities
• Seeking ways to integrate current rural initiatives so that they are more complementary

2. Nurturing the Rural Teacher Experience

• Developing positive long-term incentives to increase and strengthen the rural education workforce
• Encouraging teachers to remain in rural areas
• Providing a focus on rural schools in pre-service education
• Reducing professional isolation through in-service education
• Enhancing the skills of rural teaching professionals
• Encouraging teachers into small rural communities

3. Enhancing Rural Student Experience/Growth

• Supporting rural student learning needs
• Providing guidance, counselling and mentoring to rural students
• Encouraging high achievement of student learning outcomes
• Addressing learning needs of Indigenous students
• Catering for small cohorts of students in specific disciplines
• Reversing the drift of students from rural to urban areas
• Dealing with the diversity of student learning needs in rural areas

4. Building Rural School Communities

• Helping revitalise rural schools by restructuring their facilities
• Making rural schools more viable and relevant to community needs
• Increasing community/parent expectations of rural student learning
• Involving community/parents in student learning in rural settings

5. Responding to Cultural Diversity

• Developing a communication strategy that informs rural and regional communities of current and future rural education initiatives
• Encouraging key rural and regional groups/communities to identify and structure local priorities
• Connecting Indigenous communities with schools

6. Optimising the Curriculum

• Encouraging flexibility of rules and regulations at a local level to enable local responses to emerge
• Linking regional development to assist the design of customised strategic plans to improve the viability of rural schools
• Catering for diversity, creativity, subject knowledge, and multigrade classes in curriculum implementations

7. Improving Resources in Rural Schools

• Reporting on ways to review rural access
• Auditing education provision to determine broad areas of need
• Creating a more balanced system across rural and remote areas
• Developing technology and communication to support rural education

8. Addressing Special Issues in Rural Education

• Catering for small rural schools
• Catering for inequities in rural education due to distance