Advisor Spotlight: Louka Parry — Pt. 1
We met Louka at the Salzburg Global Seminar in early 2019. An educator, leader, speaker, and passionate learner, Louka is also an advisor for Learning Economy and sits on the executive board for Karanga, the Global Alliance for Social Emotional Learning. This call was so chock-full of absolute gold, we decided to split it into two parts!
Duncan: Let’s start with a little bit about your background.
Louka: So it’s funny. I sit here in Dublin. I came here as an 18 year old not knowing what I wanted to do in the world. And I spent six months here the first time I was away from home. It really is a rite of passage in many ways, because I finished high school and moved across to the other side of the world and go live by myself in a new city.
One thing I realized early on was that education is one of the key levers that we have. A great education can unlock doors for everybody. So that’s why chose to be an educator. I became passionate in languages so I studied languages and became a teacher back in Adelaide in South Australia, and then moved to a very remote Aboriginal community in central Australia. I was fired up and passionate to make a difference. It was an incredibly different context from the one I grew up in, and there were many barriers and challenges in the way of a great education for our students.
But we did some remarkable work together and I learnt a lot from the Anangu, the traditional owners of the land. I became a principal at 27 at that same school, did that for a year and a half, took some leave. Then moved to Melbourne and joined the startup community at a training company for teachers and helped to build that for four years, working increasingly internationally. I’ve always been interested in education, more recently in entrepreneurship, and most recently in what, specifically, are the skill sets that we need to equip young people with to be able to navigate the ambiguity of the modern world.
I feel grateful to be able to travel around the world and support school systems and organizations, companies, to kind of transform the way that they do things because it can’t just be about small tweaks anymore, it’s about reimagining what’s actually possible.
On Being an Educator
Duncan: Your background as an educator I’m sure informs a lot of what you believe and what you do. Back when you were a teacher, can you tell me a little bit more about that?
Louka: To be honest my experience is different from most in education. In working in the Central Desert of Australia, in a small community, what I discovered very quickly was the enormous gap between the curriculum and the actual desires of the student cohort and the student body. The disconnect was vast. Why?
I was teaching some wonderful students and learners and working alongside Aboriginal colleagues for whom social change has been incredibly rapid. They were used to having millennia old traditions embedded into community life, traveling out in a car and digging for honey ants or maku (witchetty grubs), singing traditional songs, speaking the Pitjantjatjara or Yankunytjatjara languages. For me it’s so obvious that there was this enormous gap between the industrial model — “the system” — and effectively what learners need, contextually relevant learning. We would have debates in the staffroom, philosophical debates. “Should we even be teaching this way?”
I had a fantastic principal and she gave me a lot of room to innovate. We tried lots of interesting things. For example we were one of the first schools in Australia to recognise “secret men’s business” which is an initiation process that’s undertaken in that particular part of Australia. Thousands of years old, revered and valued by all in the community. An incredibly important rite of passage for boys transitioning to young men. We actually mapped that to the curriculum of the state. That’s taking something that the learners in the community cared about and saying, “You know what, we’re going to make education fit for you, not try to squeeze you into the education”. That was my baptism of fire into that context.
We started to run with project-based learning as much as possible to bring more language and culture into the curriculum, which we figured was completely appropriate. We wanted to create young people that were empowered in their traditional indigenous identity and language, but also had the capability to interact and take advantage of the huge opportunities that modern Australian life provides. So for me it was a bit different. It was so obvious to me, the idea of the learning future was something that I was thinking about early on.
I was named Inspirational Teacher of the Year for South Australia, because of this kind of innovative work that we were doing in a tough and underprivileged community, that also had some fantastic strengths. I was very lucky. I stepped into innovation immediately and I’ve never stopped.
I kind of learnt about the future of education from working alongside one of the world’s longest continuous cultures. That, to me, is an interesting juxtaposition. I didn’t start in this high tech school with amazing technology. No, I started by at times taking my students out and sitting around under a tree, talking about different issues and doing a cook over a campfire.
Duncan: That sounds like a hell of an opportunity. I imagine some people would have felt overwhelmed or out of place, but it seems like you made the most of it.
Louka: Don’t get me wrong, I was completely overwhelmed, but at the same time you can be more than one thing. You can be exhausted as I was, because you know, it’s always exhausting learning to be a teacher those first few years. But it was also incredibly exciting and eye-opening. Hugely rewarding in many ways. And heartbreaking at the same time. There are some great success stories that we have with young leaders in the community that go on to become incredible role models now, and there are other ones where if I had my time over I would have found another way to reach a particular child. You’ve got those kids where you think “I could have done something better”.
That’s what drives me and what drives a lot of teachers, a lot of people working in this space. We want every single young person to get what they need for this world, which is increasing in change and ambiguity. All this change, it’s going to impact their lives, and it’s going to impact ours as well.
On New Educational Models
Louka: Look at the traditional model, the industrial model it might be called, and then compare it to the modern or the emerging, post-industrial model of education. [With the industrial model, you look] at a textbook and say, what’s the content? Then teach the content, and then teach skills based on the content, and then maybe think about a disposition based on the skills, based on the content and then, you do a project that actually engages with the real world. You know, you write an essay, you write a paper, you do a poster, you do a multimedia presentation, you make a website.
We should flip that. First we should ask, what’s happening around us right now in the world? What’s the real life process that we could be engaging with here in education? In our school? In our university? For that matter what disposition, what character do we want our learners to develop? What skills support that development, and what high quality content can we use to support the entire process?
That is flipping the design model and there are plenty of examples of schools and educators that do this really, really well. High-quality, project-based learning particularly is one tactic we should all look at and should be increasingly prevalent in most cities around the world.
Duncan: Tell me more about that idea, high-quality, project-based learning.
Louka: Absolutely. Duncan, when was the last time you sat in a room and someone said “Okay, without using any resources, tell me about X. Just what you can remember.” That doesn’t happen in the real world anymore!
What we consider “cheating” in a school or university, we call resourcefulness everywhere else. The idea is, I call up a friend to find out some information, actually get in touch with a person that works in the industry. When it’s in an exam context, you are specifically prevented from doing those particular things that of course you do in the real world. And most things in the real world are projects.
If you think about it, right now you’re having a conversation so there can be an article written. It’s a project, there’s a time frame, there’s a clear idea of where we’re heading in terms of an objective.
Duncan: I wouldn’t even think to think of a phone call as a project, but it absolutely is.
Louka: Isn’t it really? We’re doing it for a specific purpose, and the purpose is this, and at some point the project will be closed.
And so looking at the world and trying to bring that thinking into schools is a great way to up engagement, to increase relevance but also to make sure that young people are being exposed to what it feels like to create a project, to ship a product, to build a service, to work collaboratively in teams against a particular timeframe. High-quality, project-based learning absolutely is one of the powerful learning models that we’re seeing
It’s an interesting way to think about it. It’s not about ignoring content. I don’t know last time that you or I learned a skill without engaging with some content, right? But it’s about ensuring that there’s the appropriate blend, and also the right type of design. The best teachers today have this designer mindset. They think about learning from an architecture perspective, from a design perspective. That’s the challenge for educators, as often you know there are lots of demands on their time, energy, and attention. How can we support them to be able to evolve into this particular type of educator? Most educators if given the opportunity would relish taking on that job.
Keep an eye out for the second half of the interview. We’ll be releasing it shortly!
