In this paper, we critically analyse the difficulties as well as potential strengths of trying to form collaborative partnerships as researchers, across cultural differences and with diverse community groups. For example, what does 'acknowledging' very different cultural perspectives actually mean to/in this kind of research process? The ways in which relations of power amongst all parties are played out in/through such an approach is also opened up for scrutiny and further discussion.

Aboriginal people continue to be the most educationally disadvantaged adult and student groups in Australia. The continuous reproduction of reports documenting the extent to which Indigenous peoples are disadvantaged by Western education, and solutions which promise more of the same done better, prompted us to seek funding for a research that would record solutions sought by the Indigenous Community and result in some kind of action being taken, with that action being designed and initiated by the Indigenous community and by the local school. Consequently, this project was funded through a small internal grant from the School of Education, Arts and Social Science University of South Australia.

A primary aim of this project was to listen actively to all key stakeholders in the educational process, particularly to Indigenous parents and Elders of the Aboriginal Community, and to teachers and administrators at the Area School. Additionally, a number of services were resident and/or active, or have recently been active in the area including FAYS, Centrelink, ATSIC funded services, CDEP as well as the Crime Prevention Unit of the Attorney General’s Office and the Aboriginal Services Division of the Dept. of Human Services. The two of us consulted with these agencies, with members of the Indigenous community, with a small group of teachers at the local Area School, and with other service providers in the community.

Through consultations we aimed to:

• identify current strengths and concerns of various community groups regarding the provision of meaningful culturally inclusive schooling to engage Aboriginal students in education;

• map the current knowledge/power relations among various education and support service providers and members of the Indigenous community; then,

• develop, on the basis of these consultations and in collaboration with key community and education groups a community-based education project to improve the literacy, numeracy or technological skills of non-attending adolescent students; and

• to examine, with a small group of teachers and a focus group from the Indigenous community how pedagogies that build on the Community's knowledge might be implemented.

Through the use of community consultation processes, we sought to explore the ways that relations of power within the remote community might become more productive for all people concerned with the educational process. Listening to various groups was a key strategy that we tried to implement, noting Leonard's (1997) argument for the necessity to:

The collaborative framework that formed the basis of this project was utilised in order to begin the process of (re)constructing, in conceptually different ways, educational programs that would engage with and value Indigenous students’ own meaning making processes, to help them utilise different kinds of learning opportunities for economic, social and political self-determination, which we see as an important guiding principle for all those working with Indigenous people.

The project had two stages. The first stage research was short-term (three school terms in 2001) and provided the information necessary to shape and implement the second stage.

In the second and ongoing stage of the research, the authors in collaboration with key members of the community, intend to seek funding for projects that have been initiated and endorsed by the Community and that can be trialled and evaluated over three years.

Our aim was to listen to and draw upon the expertise of the diverse community groups, to acknowledge their very different cultural perspectives and to try to find the commonalities as well as the differences. The research questions we investigated were: how might key people in the community work together to improve the educational experiences of Aboriginal students in this remote community? What starting points for changing unproductive relations, processes and programs (as evidenced by the high exit rates of Indigenous students) can be designed together so that Indigenous youth experience education as both personally meaningful and satisfying?

In this paper, we report on the research processes that we used with the aim of reflecting on those processes. Specifically we discuss some of the theoretical frameworks that informed the research process; consider methodological issues/dilemmas that arose in and through this process; and then discuss the implications of these for further research in and with Indigenous communities.

The research design was informed by a number of Aboriginal research and policy documents which have found Western education is failing Indigenous children, particularly those in remote communities (Hughes, 1984;Wooltorton, 1997; Foley, 1999) and others which found schooling experienced as intrusive and oppressive by Indigenous young people (Colman-Dimon, 2000; Dodson, 1994; Smith, 1996; Morgan and Slade, 1998). The 'Coolangatta Statement on Indigenous Rights in Education' (1999) derived from the World Indigenous Peoples’ Conference on Education. This document succinctly states:

The Coolangatta Statement by bringing together and emphasising both the educational rights of Indigenous peoples and the right to be Indigenous brings to notice the colonising nature of the education system generally and the teaching practices that are systemically structured. The focus of the Coolangatta Statement incorporates a right to self-determination. Principles of self determination also informed our research. For us, this meant ensuring that Aboriginal concerns were heard and translated into action. However, the limits of funding as we will discuss later, placed serious constraints on our ability to work in a way that shared ownership of the research between researchers and research participants.

Key documents including The National Inquiry into Rural and Remote Education – ‘Emerging Themes’ (2000), and Learning Lessons: An Independent Review of Indigenous Education in the Northern Territory (1999) suggest that Indigenous people have become alienated from the school system and that Aboriginal 'voice' needs to be heard in relation to the education of Indigenous children.

For example, one of the recommendations of the Burke et al Report (2000) was that schools' curricula should be developed in conjunction with parents and community members with the local Aboriginal Student Support and Parent Association (ASSPA Committees) having a meaningful role. As well, Burke et al (2000) suggested that curricula should be focused on developing literacy and numeracy and be relevant to the pupils by taking account of local environment and culture, including Indigenous language. This requires considerable input by the local Indigenous community and a role in the school’s decision-making processes, particularly in relation to curriculum development. As a starting point for this, we saw the first stage of our project as one of consultation with Aboriginal parents, students and Elders.

Tuhiwai Smith (1999) speaking to the importance of Aboriginal voice in educational research, notes that:

In an attempt to deal with questions such as these and aware of power relations between 'researcher' and 'researched', we explored a number of approaches including that of Action Research. Because this starts by the researchers working with the community to identify issues of concern and proceeds to then working at the local level to design and trial solutions, this methodology seemed to provide some starting points for our project.

Another model that also informed our research was that developed by Theiss (1987) for research she did in the Kimberley region of Western Australia (and which she refers to as 'research in dialogue').

For Theiss the practice of research in dialogue involved preparatory discussions with the communities being researched so that they could make some input into the way the research was structured. Initial discussions in her work resulted in the drafting and circulating of research proposals and their adoption after discussion with relevant Indigenous community groups. The permission of the community for the research to go ahead is sought, but more than that, it gives the community at least partial ownership of the research project. Theiss also had the funding to employ a translator/interpreter and temporary research assistants from the various communities she was researching. As well, she and her research group set up a steering committee made up of representatives from local Indigenous organizations with an interest in the study area. Her other research tools involved attendance at community meetings to gather information about educational issues of concern to particular communities and then based on this information gathering, she conducted semi structured individual interviews. Theiss spent comparatively long periods of time in the communities she was researching with a final field trip for her researchers of eight weeks.

These are the models that influenced the way that we structured our research. But funding constraints ensured that we adapted rather than adopted the Theiss model. One criteria we couldn’t meet was the time spent on site.

Adapting the Theiss model to our level of funding meant leaving out much of what Theiss did and redesigning bits that were consistent with the sharing of power between researcher and researched that we saw as informing Theiss’ model and which was central to our research and as well, stayed within the parameters of what our funding would allow. We did establish a Reference Committee and maintained contact over the duration of Stage One of our project with key Aboriginal educators and community members through email, phone calls and newsletters. We were able to establish links with the Aboriginal community through family and friendship relationships. In order to share some of the decision making in relation to the research took some creative thinking to develop at least a partially democratic process that fitted in with our budget and time constraints.

• Indigenous parents and key community representatives from the Indigenous Community;

• teachers, Aboriginal Education Workers and administrators from the school;

• Indigenous students in school;

• key personnel from agencies, including Family and Youth Services (FAYS), TAFE, and the local Town Council.

Discussions were either audiotaped and/or extensively noted. Interviews were largely unstructured with guiding questions to stimulate discussion. Analysis of the taped discussions and interviews used grounded research theory (Lincoln and Guba, 1985) in order to identify key themes and issues that emerged in the consultations.

On the basis of these conversations, an Interim Report was written and distributed to all research participants. The report specifically focused on three key areas: a) what was working in school for Indigenous students? b) what were the concerns about Indigenous students' education? c) what could be done to better address these concerns?

In July, 2001, we returned for another five days to discuss the Interim Report, to further clarify our understandings and to give participants an opportunity to respond and give us feed back on the Report. In light of these discussions, a 'Final Report' was produced.

One intention of our research was to document the desires of the community in terms of the education of their children. Some solutions community members had articulated quite forcefully, and others were germinating but could become more solid through discussion. In this way this part of our research project was to collect the ideas of the community some of which we anticipated would be scattered and not fully formed and formulate them through discussion and documentation. What we were actually doing was collecting the knowledge of the community on this particular issue, that is how to continue the formal education of kids who had rejected formal schooling, and in turn, giving that knowledge back to the community it a way that was of use to them.

A number of problems arise out of this. Firstly, there were a number of different language groups that made up the community. As well there were a number of dominant families. These crossed over in different ways.

This amalgamation of different families into ‘one’ community setting, is in part a result of the forced relocation of Aboriginal group from their traditional homelands into centralised mission stations—an historical pattern that was enforced by early European administrators and missionaries and which has had long term debilitating results for Aboriginal people. It is misleading, therefore to see this Community as unified and homogenous.

The need to recognise this diversity within the Community was emphasised by various community members as well as a number of teachers. For example, there are wide social and economic differences among the families that in turn created different needs and expectations of what educational contexts can or should offer to the children. . For some parents, their children's access to the dominant knowledge/power constructs through education was viewed as necessary in order to open up different life choices. There were other families in the community who as Grant (2001, 97) suggests were not part of the ‘culture of power’, and who were unable or chose not to provide their children with knowledge about the behaviours and disciplines that are needed to survive at school. A problem associated with this resistance to being socialised into the dominant culture is that other functions of schooling, including the educational function, is refused as well. What this amounts to is that if Indigenous students resist the enculturation that the school offers, then access to meaningful education is also denied them.

To become familiar with these relationships and the different groups within the community required time to attend meetings, listen to a variety of people talking in different situations and just generally to hang out in the community and with community members. Gaining knowledge of the protocol that was specific to this community was difficult. While we started from a model of 'research as dialogue', we found that who we could converse with was in part determined by the limited time and funds we had to expend on the project.

A theoretical problem arises in relation to the power relations that existed in the community we were researching most of which were outside the framework of our research. However, central to our research was the power relationship that existed between various groups in the Indigenous community and the school. We saw our research as intervening in such a way as to strengthen the power of these groups in the community to have a say in the education of their children, vis a vis the school.

By structuring our research as discussion rather than interview we tried to involve the parents, to enable them to feel an ownership with the aims of the project. To a limited extent this happened. For example, in discussions with a small group of women, we found that the focus of our discussion was changed by the group. Our focus was what kind of educational activities could the community devise and implement that would involve out-of-school kids in some aspects of literacy and numeracy and so keep them in touch with formal education. For this particular group of parents, this discussion was peripheral to their concerns. Their kids were in school. Their concern was how to get the school personnel to listen to them as parents, to improve the educational outcomes for their kids and to strengthen their participation in the educational decision making of the school as it affected their sons and daughters. Of particular concern was the Aboriginal Student Support Parent Awareness Committee (ASSPA) and the way staff of the school ‘took over’ the running of monthly meetings, set the agendas and allocated the ASSPA funds using the committee to rubber stamp decisions already made within the school.

Through discussing this issue with us, this focus group of women was able to clarify their ideas, receive feed back and confirmation from us as critical outsiders, gain information about the experiences of other ASSPA committees and receive information about reports that have been done on the function and functioning of ASSPA committees in other schools. In this way this group was theorising from their own experiences, drawing on available information and constructing knowledge that was useful to them. In a research situation in which there was the potential for them to become the objects of research, through the processes of 'research as dialogue', they were able to transform themselves into subject.

Freire (1970:4) has an analysis of this kind of self-empowering action. While not using that terminology, he describes empowering action as integration with one’s context instead of adapting to it. Freire calls integration, ‘a distinctively human activity’; he describes it as the capacity to adapt oneself to reality, plus the critical ability to make choices and to transform that reality. The integrated person in Freire’s terms is subject, and the adaptive person is object. The problem for researchers is how to construct research so that all participants are subjects and as such owners and co-constructors of the research.

The phrase ‘community empowerment’ is an important part of the title of our project, suggesting, in fact, the methodology we were using. However, the concept of empowerment is problematic in terms of the various meanings that have been assigned to it. Gore (1993) describes some of these common usages of the term, ie as implying that power is a possession that one person has and can distribute to others; (ie. power as property) or as incorporating an agent that is somebody who acts to empower; or empowerment as a desirable end. We were informed by the last meaning and saw 'empowerment of the community' in relation to education as a desirable end and ourselves and our research project as tools to achieve that end. Our view, in terms of this particular piece of research and indeed research generally, is that researchers should see themselves as agents acting in the interests of the communities they are researching.

However, we were researching not one but two or perhaps three communities; the Indigenous community; the school and the various service providers all of whom interacted with each other in a variety of ways but which in many ways were also separate. The title of our research could suggest that bias was built into the research in favour of the community. We would argue that having, acknowledging and making transparent a standpoint need not result in uncritical or biased reporting. Part of our standpoint, evident in the project title, was that of taking a social justice approach to research planning, and of viewing research as a strategy for social change.

However, our standpoint was questioned in follow-up discussions with staff concerning the findings included in the Interim Report. When we met with them to seek their responses to the report, some members of staff expressed the view that the Interim Report was ‘heavily slanted with views from outside’ the school, and that many of the parental responses reflected the Indigenous community members’ own unhappy experiences with education. We noted this critique. However, the purpose of the study was to investigate reasons for the early exiting of Aboriginal students and to report the ideas and concerns of all key stakeholders, not with the aim of ‘laying blame’ but with the intention of providing a means for all to express their concerns and to provide critical information that could aid in addressing the problem. Therefore, while we acknowledged the staff concern, we believed that it was essential to report on what each group said, how they perceived the issues from their often very diverse points of view.

One of the issues that emerged in discussions with Aboriginal students was the high level of racism that students experienced, and their beliefs that teachers themselves were powerless to stop it. By opening up a dialogue with the students, they were able to speak about some aspects of schooling that ‘shamed’ them. About this, students said:

‘Mapping’ how the issues and problems were perceived from a wide range of perspectives, ie., by including the voices of those who felt silenced or devalued because of structural relations of power, for example the Indigenous students, we saw as a means to offer new insights and through these to draft new solutions to recurring problems. Nevertheless, the criticism from the school staff, did raise questions for us about our own roles as researchers and the processes of research for social change, and highlighted some of the dilemmas raised by Tuhawi Smith (1999), as mentioned earlier. (For example, Whose research is it? Who owns its? Whose interests does it serve? Who will benefit from it?)

From the above, we see three major issues of concern that emerge from our work on this project: firstly the way funding constructs and constrains research for social change; secondly, the ways in which knowledge/power relations are shaped through the design of the project; thirdly, our own positioning as researchers in relation to different groups of participants.

Funding constraints and the resultant limitations placed on time able to be spent on a research site actually constructs the research and confines the methodology to a very conservative and orthodox way of interacting with the research participants. As already mentioned, more time spent in the community would have enabled us to engage with those members who were less easily accessible, more time would also allow us to present, discuss and further explore with community members the 'findings' of the project. Additionally, both for non-Indigenous researchers and Indigenous researchers not of the language group being researched, it would be useful and indeed courteous to have an interpreter so that people involved in the research can have a choice of language. In any case whether various Indigenous languages are spoken or not, it should be mandatory for all submissions to include the employment of an Indigenous person from the area being researched to be employed as a liaison person and as a research assistant. This involves a very useful exchange of knowledge and skills and a far more comfortable entry into the community by out-of-town researchers.

What became patently obvious to us doing this research was the way funding as centralized, structured and controlled, perpetuates the great divide between researchers and researched. Whether or not the research is socially useful, to what extent it involves the community being researched as co-researchers or provides opportunities for communities, particularly Indigenous communities, to set the research agenda are not relevant to funding bodies. To communicate our findings to the community and involve the community in constructing knowledge based on those findings required time and money we didn't have. We recognize that most researchers would argue that more funding would allow more time on the project and therefore better research outcomes. However, we believe that when researching with Indigenous communities, this is essential in order to 'decolonise [the] methodologies' (Tuhiwai Smith, 1999), that is, to move outside the western paradigm, to investigate new ways of constructing and engaging in research with Indigenous communities.

Tuhiwai Smith, (1999) for instance cites four models of research developed by Graham Smith for non-Indigenous and non-resident Indigenous researchers, when working with Indigenous communities. A 'tiaki model' has key Indigenous people guide and sponsor the research and mentor the researcher; the 'whangai model' is one in which the researchers are incorporated into the daily life of the people being researched; a third model involves power sharing and the participation of the researched in the whole of the research project; and a fourth model Smith refers to as 'an empowering outcomes model'.

Our research probably fits into this fourth category in that the intent of the research as suggested by the title was to empower the Indigenous community and with the community, to find ways that they could intervene in the education of their children. Our design was an attempt to put 'research as dialogue' into practice. From our point of view, this worked well in several instances. For example, the exchange of information between Von and the local ASSPA parent committee was an example of how, through participating in the research, these women's ideas and concerns about their children's education and in particular, their troubled relationship with the school, were acknowledge and affirmed. Explicit advice was offered by Von regarding how they could better address the unequal relations of power between the school and the ASSPA committee. In turn, we as researchers gained invaluable insights into current relations of power that we would not otherwise have been able to access. This exchange of views gave us much better insight into the silencing of the parents that was occurring. and enabled us also to begin to understand why young people chose to leave the school from an early age. Thus knowledge was socially constructed as a two way conversation between researchers and participants.

'Research as dialogue' aims to genuinely allow a diversity of voices to be 'heard'. However, it is important to note nevertheless, that we as the researchers wrote the report; we selected the aspects of the interviews that we found most relevant to the concerns of the research. We recognize that we as researchers construct meanings rather than ‘capture’ realities. There always exists the impossibility of ever speaking ‘for’ someone else. Even with the best of intentions, what we present is still a re-presentation of the many ideas of the people we spoke with during this project.

Finally this leads us into the third issue: that of our relationships as researchers to the different groups within the community. While we sought more socially just educational outcomes for the Indigenous students, we also had to confront the question: 'how powerful is the researcher in bringing about social change?' From experience of this project, we realize that the researchers' role may be confined to providing a knowledge base from which the community itself can develop strategies for change. The research project per se does not challenge the status quo of current power relations within the community. This is why it becomes crucial for the Indigenous community to be involved in all aspects of the research process, in all stages, in order to 'own' the outcomes and feel able to act on them. We believe that only through such local, contextualised ownership of research processes will more socially just outcomes be achieved.

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