Remote Educational Leadership: What’s Different?

In Australia, ‘remote’ education is often placed in a different category from ‘rural’ education. For the purpose of this chapter, we consider ‘remote’ to be a subset of a broader ‘rural’ description of geographically isolated areas that are distant from larger metropolitan centres. ‘Remote’ schools often cater for mining or agricultural communities and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. Our concern here is with the latter group. We present three case studies of educational leadership based on research conducted in remote Aboriginal communities and homelands of the Northern Territory and South Australia. While there are some commonalities with educational leadership in rural towns and communities, different dynamics come in to play in places where the priorities for learning are sometimes quite different, and where language and culture differences experienced by non-local leaders present a challenge that are not present in predominantly ‘white’ rural towns. In our analysis of the three case studies, we synthesise the key features of rural educational leadership, and offer a summary of how ‘leadership’ might be defined differently in remote Aboriginal communities and homelands.