Agency and voice: Aboriginal student researchers working with their teachers as allies and accomplices

Abstract This paper details a unique study undertaken at a regional Western Australian Vocational Education and Training (VET) Aboriginal boarding school, describing the research design, an overview of the research project and the findings that evolved. The study sought to answer the question of how well the school was preparing its young people to transition from school to life beyond school. It involved the teachers working as teacher researchers and the young people currently enrolled at the school as student researchers . Together as allies and accomplices, they collected data through a collaborative dialogic approach to capture, through interviews via yarning , the perceptions of former students. The project evolved organically, with the student researchers increasingly taking responsibility for the research, influencing the research design, actively shaping it with their ideas, and inculcating it with their own cultural and linguistic approaches. This resulted in greater engagement by both the current students and the participants who were former students at the school. With their teachers, the student researchers carefully applied the appropriate protocols to create a collection of stories that rigorously and respectfully captured the voices of the former students and their accounts of their lived experiences as they transitioned to life beyond school. This collaborative research culminated in producing a three-part podcast series that included edited interviews undertaken by the students, their original art design, songwriting and performance and a mobile app that addressed the issues that emerged in the findings.