‘Can I survive in the rural school?’ Development of mobile rural early-career teacher resilience

ABSTRACTMobilising urban early-career teachers to commonly perceived ‘under-resourced’ and ‘challenging’ rural schools has become an approach to address the rural teacher shortage and improve rural teacher quality. However, the demographic change often requires mobile rural-early career teachers (MR-ECTs) better prepare for a different educational environment. This qualitative case study explores the professional trajectories of four MR-ECTs in a rural primary school in Guangxi, China, regarding their process and outcome of adaptation during their first two years of teaching. Adopting semi-structured interviews, this study finds that the MR-ECTs were somehow under-prepared for the rural school and adopted a ‘deficit’ mindset in the first place to perceive their professional challenges in the rural school. Yet, they gradually became more resilient in overcoming the challenges and retaining in the rural school by harnessing and collecting available resources from their pre-service and in-service experiences to increase their place consciousness and rural readiness. This understanding will enable teachers, teacher educators, policymakers and school leaders to assist MR-ECTs’ ruralisation and contribution to rural schools in more informed ways.KEYWORDS: Early-career teachersrural educationteacher resilienceteacher mobility AcknowledgementsThis research obtained a Human Ethics Certificate of Approval from Monash University Human Research Ethics Committee (21222), and was supported by the Capital University of Economics and Business (Grant No. XRZ2023009).Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).