Teachers and the emotional dimensions of class in resource‐affected rural Australia

Abstract

In recent years, a ‘cultural turn’ in the study of class has resulted in a rich body of work detailing the ways in which class advantage and disadvantage are emotionally inscribed and embodied in educational settings. To date, however, much of this literature has focused on the urban sphere. In order to address this gap in the literature, this paper focuses on the affective evaluations made by teachers employed in rural and remote Australian schools of students’ families, bodies, expectations and practices. The central argument is that moral ascriptions of class by the teachers are powerfully shaped by dominant socio‐cultural constructions of rurality that equate ‘the rural’ with agriculture.

Keywords:

• class
• rural
• schools
• emotions
• Australia
• mining
• farming

Notes

1. There is not to discount some very significant early work in this area (for example, Nash 1980; Peshkin 1978; Gibson 1998). Further, within the broader field of rural social science, class has been a key focus for analysis since Newby’s (1972, 1977) seminal contributions. Historically, class has also been a key concern in studies of resource‐affected communities but this work has largely focused on single‐industry communities or ‘closed’ mining towns (for example, Dennis, Henriques, and Slaughter 1956; Williams 1981; Dicks 2000). See Panelli (2006) for a contemporary review of class in studies of rural communities.

2. The other funding partners were the Young Workers Advisory Service and the Queensland Council of Unions.

3. As of 30 June 2006, the Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal people in Australia constituted an estimated 2.5% of the population. Of this Indigenous population, 69% were living in regional, rural and remote areas of the country (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2007b). While there was an Indigenous population at all the schools we visited, and a higher than average population in two locales, the specific concerns and issues of this group of students was only raised by one interviewee. As teachers discussed ‘mining’ and ‘country’ (i.e. farming) kids, they were typically referring to the white settler population. The employment of rural Indigenous Australians in the mining sector is extremely limited as it is in productionist industrial agriculture (see Ramzan, Pini, and Bryant 2009).