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Attracting and retaining effective education leaders and teaching staff for regional, rural and remote schools in Australia is a major sustainability and quality issue facing every State and Territory. It is also a major concern in pre-service teacher education, particularly for those universities which have a commitment to rural and regional areas. There is a strategic link between teacher education and the sustainability of rural communities with earlier suggestions (White & Reid, 2008, p. 1) highlighting that "healthy rural communities may be supported via reform of the ways in which teacher education prepares graduates for teaching in rural schools". Likewise, the proposition is made in this paper that the relationship is importantly reciprocal and that, in turn, healthy rural communities and "successful rural schools" can inform and help reform teacher education and professional learning through the insights gathered into the ways in which rural education leaders and teaching staff work closely with their school communities. In this paper, the authors draw specifically from the research findings of a three-year Australian Research Council funded project (2008-2010) of schools and communities where sustainable practices around staff recruitment and retention were identified to explore this reciprocal relationship. The paper will firstly discuss the context of the study, its method and conceptual framework, and then focus in particular on the emerging themes from the 20 case-studies across Australia. Themes discussed include the important linking between rural school leadership and community renewal; the possibilities of developing school-university partnerships to sustain the rural workforce; and the need for social and creative enterprise to be acknowledged as important work of rural teachers and leaders. The paper concludes with the implications of these themes in terms of better preparing a future rural teacher workforce. (Contains 2 figures.)

This article presents descriptive insights into how a national research team located in three Australian states (New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia), is able to maintain a sustained, cohesive approach to achieving the project's aim. The initial section of the article introduces each team member prior to discussing the importance of taking a national perspective on rural education. The second section considers the research design and shows how the main objective of the investigation will be achieved. Emerging trends from the quantitative and qualitative data collected in 2008 are revealed in the third section. The discussion in the fourth section centres on how the trends emerging from the collected data requires a reconceptualisation of preparing pre-service teachers for non-metropolitan placements. In doing so, the project's emerging conceptual framework, which emphasises that preparation of teachers for rural and regional appointments needs to be considered beyond the terms and forms of traditional professional practice, is explored. (Contains 3 tables and 1 figure.)

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor discusses an article on overcoming student resistance and fostering engagement in teaching among primary students by Mary O'Dowd, rural trip of pre-service teacher by Elaine Sharplin and career decisions made by rural students by Ken Stevens.