Yarning: a responsive research methodology

Abstract

This paper explores 'yarning' as a research method which emerged in a cross-cultural PhD as a means of building a research partnership between feminist and Indigenous leaders in early childhood education. This method created an avenue for the researcher, positioned as both insider and outsider, to hear and understand the voices ofthe Indigenous participants. This responsiveness became a strength of the research which enabled a profound, complex and subtle understanding to emerge across the contact zone (Pratt, 1992: 4) between academic research methods and Indigenous cultures, by bringing them into discursive relations with each other (Griffiths, 1998: 45).