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This article presents analysed data from the first year of the Rural Teacher Education Project (RTEP 2007-2009) with a view to illustrating how a generative theory of rurality as education research was developed, and for which ends it might be utilised. The article suggests that data from projects in rural communities, which take the rural as context, need to interrogate the role and purpose of education in such contexts in relation to notions of social and professional identity. I argue for the application of a social theory in which the rural is linked to the possibilities of identity and interaction in terms of the quality of teacher education and the quality of education in rural communities. The theory accounts for the ability of people (in this case teachers) to sustain themselves in space and time - both as subjects and agents able to resist or transform the environment, depending on resources available. It also illuminates the reality, or otherwise, of subjectivities and perceptions in our collective imaginary concerning education and the transformation project in South Africa.
Keywords: Rurality, generative theory, agency, forces, resources, identity, community development.
Introduction
In 2007, Balfour, Moletsane and Mitchell launched a project entitled the Rural Teacher Education Project (RTEP) in the Faculty of Education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. The project, funded by Nedbank, Toyota and the National Research Foundation, was part of the NRF niche area (Every Voice Counts: Rural teacher development in the age of AIDS (De Lange, Mitchell, Moletsane, Balfour, Wedekind, Pillay & Buthelezi, 2010) and was completed in 2009. The RTEP focused on issues such as numeracy, literacy, gender and violence in schools. Findings pertaining to these issues are discussed in a range of publications (Islam, 2007; Islam, Mitchell, De Lange, Balfour & Combrinck, 2011; De Lange et al., 2010). In 2008, an article published in the Journal of Rural and Community Development (Balfour, Moletsane & Mitchell, 2008) conceptualised a generative theory of rurality as education research, drawing from RTEP. This social theory was aimed at analysing assumptions about rurality and education in rural contexts, and its premise was that people make use of time, space and resources differently to transform an environment, rather than be subject to it. While the article written in 2008 explained...