Leadership skills from the desert

The kids in Mimili didn’t want to ask Louka Parry’s name when he first arrived in the tiny Indigenous community tucked in the north-western corner of South Australia. 

They just wanted to know how long he was staying.

“To me, that said; “I want to know if you’re going to commit to the community before I make any commitment with you”, Mr Parry reflects. People in remote communities like Mimili are too used to seeing white faces passing through, as different service providers and educators come for a short term and then leave, he explains. 

That first day in town, when questioned by a little boy, Mr Parry’s answer was that he’d be around for two years, and then he was going travelling. 

“So of course two years became three, then four then five,” he remembers. 

“This isn’t necessarily the normal teaching trajectory out of a teaching degree – of course I think it should be more normal, you know we need great teachers out in these places,” he adds.

“But it was somewhere that I made a huge connection with, and people are very welcoming and very patient with you and it’s been a fantastic journey.”

Those experiences in Mimili inspired him to study the secrets of leadership.

“When I landed in the middle of Australia, I was very fortunate to have a great leader at that school and she developed my capacity in a big way,” Mr Parry explains. 

“I very well could have landed in another school without a supportive leader and that would have changed my educational trajectory completely. I may not even be a teacher today,” he says. 

“Instructional leadership is very much in vogue at the moment, but there is an evidence base there to suggest that it’s far more impactful on student outcomes than transformational leadership.” 

Mr Parry decided to study a Master of Instructional Leadership that was offered in weekend intensives at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, even though it meant a formidable commute. 

“Initially, it was a 4am wakeup, a five-hour drive to Alice Springs then a flight to Melbourne,” he says. 

“So it was quite a logistical challenge, but one of the benefits is that it was in intensive modules so you can continue to work in your school setting, and then come and be exposed to cutting-edge educational ideas, and then totally interweave them into your practice as a school leader,” he explains. 

Mr Parry is one of an increasingly large cohort of professionals willing to travel interstate to take the course.

More than 40 per cent of enrolments in the Master and Professional Certificate in Instructional Leadership over the past two years have been interstate students. In 2014, students from NSW comprised almost 30 per cent of the Professional Certificate cohort, while others came from as far afield as Western Australia and northern Queensland.

“(It’s) been fantastic, and instrumental in my development – particularly the collegiate body,” he says.

“Having access to a group of national school leaders all of whom are working in diverse contexts is invaluable for exploring general principles of leadership, as well as what’s necessary in different contexts to get the best from your staff, from yourself and from your students.”

Leading in another language

Mimili’s 300 residents speak Western Desert languages Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara, but classes are taught in English, with Aboriginal Education Workers on hand to interpret and support instruction.

In his time there, Louka reached a level of proficiency but described fluency as ‘perhaps a lifelong goal’. However, language wasn’t the only way to make classes useful for students.

“There’s a strong imperative for us to have rigorous teaching methods to make sure our students can access different codes of power.

“They can have strength within their own Anangu identity, but also the skill set and capacity to work within the Western culture and all of the opportunities that brings to these communities.” 

Language aside, Mr Parry says he learnt a lot about communication in Indigenous culture.

“We work on a cultural interface, so we are constantly questioning our paradigm, our perspective, because sometimes it’s diametrically opposed to that of the traditional culture, and so we have to be very inclusive in the way we do that, but we also need to challenge our own understandings.”

One example is the tendency of native English-speakers to ask direct questions, which in the traditional Aboriginal culture is quite confronting,” Mr Parry says.

“We had to adjust our pedagogy accordingly.

“Although our Western society largely understands the purpose of schooling implicitly, this may not be the case in Anangu communities. Co-creating an educational vision with all stakeholders and working diligently towards these goals is a key part of any long-term success.”

Mr Parry has now been appointed Manager of Literacy, Primary Years at South Australia’s Department of Education and Child Development, and plans to apply the lessons he learnt at Mimili and the leadership skills he honed at the MGSE to policy work. 

“Knowing the critical role of leadership and how that plays into developing a school culture, to be able to build relationships and have positive psychology built into the way teams interact – I think all those things have made me better equipped to contribute in the educational space,” he says. 

www.education.unimelb.edu.au