Firefly intensities: writing alongside English secondary students in rural schools

The voices of students are largely absent in literature about writing pedagogy (Cremin and Myhill, 2012; DeJaynes et al., 2020). The limited presence of their voices in educational research and stories about the places they inhabit are paralleled by the invisibility of their contexts in standardised testing analysis. In understandings about rural and remote places, terms like 'remote' are used uncritically, and rural students are uncritically labelled both according to their distance from metropolitan centres, and as disadvantaged because of that distance. Rural students lack the opportunity to speak back to existing measures of writing outcomes, particularly those related to context, and might welcome the opportunity to comment on how they are depicted, defined and designated as 'disadvantaged' (Corbett and Green, 2013; Halsey, 2018; Reid, 2020). The NSW English Syllabus reminds teachers that 'language shapes our understanding of ourselves and our world' (NESA, 2017, p. 10), and while stories of experience and place are valuable in the pursuit of this understanding, opportunities for young people to tell these stories to authentic audiences are few. In attempting to represent regional, rural and remote students as disadvantaged, standardised measures ignore their experiences - experiences that I attempted to understand through the collection of student writing artefacts and interviews. This paper explores the stories of two young people from a small rural town who participated in a year-long writing project and subsequent research interviews about their experiences living and writing in remote NSW and their aspirations for elsewhere and otherwise, beyond (town) limits, stereotypes and deficit discourse.