Overview

Editors:

Jenny Simpson
Central Queensland University, Australia

Geoff Danaher
Central Queensland University, Australia

Patrick Alan Danaher
University of Southern Queensland, Australia

Regional campuses have faced ongoing challenges in recruiting and retaining students and academics, building a competitive research profile and finding a secure niche within the Australian higher education field and within their diverse and geographically dispersed communities.

This Special Issue of the International Journal of Pedagogies and Learningis entitled 'Town and Gown' in the Bush: Contemporary Regional Universities and Transforming Communities' provides a forum for multiple engagements with the relationships (or lack thereof) between contemporary regional universities and their communities, whether in Australia or in other countries.

The authors of the articles in this issue address three key questions currently confronting regional universities and their communities:

In seeking to address these questions, the issue is also directed at re-examining the concept of 'transformations' in regional communities in the early 21st century. Transformations, understood as permanent and substantial changes and improvements, are crucial for the ongoing development of individuals and groups.

So it is vital, now more than ever before, to understand the drivers, influences and potential outcomes of and on genuinely meaningful and productive transformations in regional communities. Within that quest for understanding, a process of evaluating the roles and responsibilities of regional universities and communities with regard to themselves and to one another is a worthwhile endeavour.

This collection offers a rich and nuanced understanding of the challenges manifest in the relationships between regional communities and universities on the one hand and models for how these relationships can be mutually enabling on the other.

Table of Contents

Guest Editors' Introduction to Special Theme issue: Town and Gown in the Bush
Jenny Simpson, Geoff Danaher, Patrick Alan Danaher

Balancing the "Town and Gown": The Risky Business of Creating Youth Theatre in Regional Queensland
Janet McDonald

Think Global, Act Local: Using the Internet to Facilitate Transformative Learning in Regional Universities
Ann-Marie Priest

Local Higher Education in a Global Age
Maria Madsen, Andrew Wallace

Learning through Research: A Regional University and Its Community
Sue Kilpatrick, Tammy Jones, Margaret Barrett

Australian Regional Universities and the Idea of the University
Tony Schirato

Review of Shaireen Rasheed, The Existentialist Curriculum of Action: Creating a Language of Freedom and Possibility
Mark A. Tyler

Review of Susan Ellsmore, Carry On, Teachers! Representations of the Teaching Profession in Screen Culture, Trentham Books, Stoke on Trent, UK and Sterling, USA, 2005, ISBN 1 85856 359 3
Patrick Alan Danaher, Emilio A. Anteliz, Phyllida Coombes