A number of people have asked what I'll be doing during my sabbatical. I am going to be a guest professor at Deakin University. What this means exactly has yet to be defined. Although I have options of working on some research projects in Melbourne, I'll be primarily working with a teacher educator named Bernadette at the rural campus. Deakin has an urban campus in Melbourne, a regional campus in Geelong (about 2 hours outside of Melbourne), and a rural campus in Warrnambool, where we'll be living (which is about another 1.5 hours from Geelong). Bernadette has invited me to basically shadow her for a while, going to the schools she visits, doing some guest teaching in her classes, and getting to know the campus. As she said, "You'll meet people, we'll talk, they'll ask you to do things..."
I do have a specific goal of recruiting authors for an edited book on self-study in rural education. Bernadette's scholarship is related to the topic of space, place, and identity in rural settings. I'm interested in learning more about how they prepare teachers for rural settings (of which there are many in Australia). However, I'm particularly interested in how one's identity as "rural" shapes the experience of teacher preparation. In our credential program at Chico State we have partnerships with many rural districts, and I'm curious to know more about how rural/suburban/urban identities of the professors, the credential students, and the mentor teachers in our partner districts impact those partnerships.
So I expect to be having a lot of conversations and learning from folks there. I expect to do a fair amount of writing since I haven't had a moment to do any original writing in years. I hope to do some workshops and guest lectures on topics with which I have some experience. And when I'm not working, I hope to do a lot of travelling. That's Andy's job - to plan the travel (and carry the luggage).
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