Progress towards equitable schooling and educational outcomes in Australia has been notoriously slow, with countless reports highlighting stark inequities between rural areas and urban centres. Most reforms have been grounded in distributive notions of social justice -- addressing funding, staffing, and resourcing -- but fail to address other domains of injustice manifest in the positioning of the rural as "Other," as deficit or in need of saving. To counter this trend, this paper examines how one teacher professional development (PD) initiative, Quality Teaching Rounds (QTR) Digital, built a "politics of recognition" for rural educators, analysed through two school-based case studies situated in diverse geographical regions of NSW, Australia: a remote central school and a small regional primary school. Drawing on interview data collected from rural educators and principals, we show how QTR Digital not only overcame the documented difficulties of accessing high-quality PD in rural Australia but also fostered a positive sense of group difference and respect for teaching and learning in these contexts. We argue that if we are to enact such significant change for rural educators, reforms that both challenge the normative ideals of city life and redefine a positive image of rural schools and communities are urgently needed.