Experts from the dormitory: Boarding school graduates as theorists

This article reads the words of two Aboriginal boarding school graduates as theory. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people, boarding is first of all a rural and remote education matter: children leave rural, remote and regional communities because senior secondary schooling is not available to them on Country, and boarding away from home becomes the dominant response to that distance. The two graduates, referred to here as M and E, are participants in an Australian Research Council funded study of the outcomes of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander boarding school graduates; their words are presented as found poems composed in their own voice. The article argues that the graduates are not data for someone else's framework. They are methodologists. Reading them inside Waya Yindyamarra, a Wiradjuri matrilineal songspiral methodology, the article asks what shifts when graduates of rural and remote boarding pathways are received as theorists rather than as voice-of-the-data. The aim is not to adjudicate between them, but to recognise that both are theorising boarding from the inside, and that the rural and remote education field's task is to listen as carefully to one as to another.