Yarning and knitting words: a cross-cultural thought experiment on writing beyond school

Abstract This article provides an account of a yarn between a First Nations Australian researcher and an Anglo-Celtic Australian researcher about the future of writing curriculum in subject English education, if school in its current settler-colonial form were to be abolished and completely re-imagined. Yarning is an Indigenous research method evolving from Indigenous cultures and ways of knowing; it is a form of knowledge production. The original yarn, on which this further creative dialogue is based, takes the form of a recorded podcast conversation between the authors, who are academic colleagues at the same university and former English teachers. The research focus of the conversation was what a post-Treaty, post-school writing education might be. However, rather than providing ready answers, our relational thinking foregrounds the challenges in asking this question, and in non-Indigenous Australians expecting Indigenous Australians to provide fixes for the problems engendered by the ongoing injustices of colonisation.