ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of the book. The book draws themes - quality, governance, rurality and gender - together to provide insights into how women teachers working in the most remote and under-resourced schools experience the teaching profession and how they understand quality teaching. The intention is to consider alternative ways of conceptualizing quality by considering what is understood to be valuable in education from different perspectives, and by exploring the pursuit of valued goals. The chapter explores how educational governance might better respond to the well-documented challenges of rural schooling to enhance the experience of rural education for pupils and for those that teach them. Education is an increasingly globalized issue and policy-makers are increasingly concerned with how ideas move around the world. The chapter deliberately moves between the regional, the national and the local. It presents an exploratory definition of quality teaching: teacher's achievement of valued professional capabilities.
