This chapter reflects on our lived experiences of data analysis and writing processes for producing one particular journal article titled ‘No shame at AIME’ (McKnight et al., 2019). AIME is the Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience; it is a not-for-profit, educational mentoring program that ‘builds mentoring bridges between universities and schools’ (aimementoring.com, 2019) for educationally disadvantaged young people. Within the lens of Community-Led Research (CLR), we rethink the role of community in the process we used in preparing the ‘No shame at AIME’ research article; we tease out who was leading whom throughout the research process and how undertaking this work in a university context affected the process and outcomes.

This is a philosophical paper, which draws on McKnight’s (2017) work on tripartation. Tripartation helped us to place Country in relationship with our experiences of CLR. The way this helped us was to utilise and connect to trees. In this way we do not just use the trees as a metaphor but as a way to explore and explain our learning from Country. Tripartation is finding spiritual connections to concepts, things or situations that are often viewed as separate or distinctive and different from each other, which is represented by the tilde (~) and replaces the more common use of the forward slash (/). For example, the tree/human binary is where we are seen as being separate; however, trees~humans both hold water in our bodies, we both need oxygen and carbon dioxide, plus we live in family groups and community. We use the tilde quite deliberately in this article to philosophise the connections in a variety of concepts and issues under discussion.

This chapter is organised in two broad moves. First, we paint a landscape of trees and describe their relationships with each other as nature, then we articulate how the academy (manifested as academics, universities and commercial publishing houses) serve as arborists to reshape what the tree and its community should be like.

​Trees live in communities

Human beings live in communities and so do trees. Both authors of this chapter recognise the communities that they belong to that have informed their experiences of working on the ‘No shame at AIME’ paper. The communities we are connected to are multiple. Each of these communities share similarities, differences and overlaps. We exist at the intersections of many communities. To support our thinking around community, McHugh, Coppola, Holt and Anderson’s (2015) research on examining the meaning of community from urban Aboriginal youth identified community as:

Although this particular study relates to young people’s experience of community through sport, this concept of community very closely aligns with our own understandings and approaches to CLR. However, our working understandings of community extend from this to acknowledge Country as key to our communities.

In our ‘No shame at AIME’ paper we used Rose’s (1996) description of the term Country, which describes Country as:

From one author’s (McKnight’s) relationship with Uncle Max Harrison (Yuin Elder), we have in our research always included the communities that make up Country (trees, animals and so on) into our thinking on community. Thereby, we share belonging to numerous communities on the South Coast of New South Wales; for example, the community of insects, mammals, birds and trees and the communities such as Nowra, Wollongong and the university. However, our relationships with other communities are different – for example, the Aboriginal author’s connection to the Aboriginal community. Anthony McKnight is an Awabakal, Gumaroi and Yuin man, and also has British heritage from his father’s family. Anthony is a father, husband, uncle, son, grandson, brother, cousin, nephew, friend and cultural man. Samantha’s family heritage is from Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Samantha and Anthony both teach in preservice teacher education and collaborate to contribute to decolonising the educational research space.

Both have written together before and work from their own knowledge systems to challenge each other’s thinking on an issue of educational in~equality. The entity that connects us both and the other authors of the ‘No shame’ paper is Yuin Country,1 which provides us with everything we need to live. We are human beings that are part of a broader community, which is Country. We recognise Yuin Country and Yuin Country’s contribution to the ‘No shame’ paper; moreover, its ongoing contribution through trees that help us reflect and think here. The team responsible for the ‘No shame’ paper are thinkers, who, ironically, are not also co-authoring this chapter: Valerie Harwood, Jake Trindorfer, Amy Priestly and Uncle Max Dulamumun Harrison. We say this not to be glib but to position ourselves as recounting our experiences, not those of all in our writing community. In this sense, what we write here is in no way generalisable to the experiences of others involved. This chapter specifically reflects on our journey (McKnight and McMahon).

The other way we can view this research conundrum is that it is very simple. Not simple as in artless or easy but simple in that the issues can be identified, discussed and resolved if each interconnecting issue is unpacked as it arises: time is required to do this respectfully. The issue may take time to arise, as may the resolution, which might have to take numerous forms, as the heart of the matter is the matter of concern: the heart. When a heart is involved, patience is required and the heart here is Country. In this sense our focus is on Aboriginal students who are Country. ‘I am placed, therefore I am’ (Mary Graham cited in Rose 2004, p. 189). Therefore, our research paper ‘No shame’ had to be placed with Country and the students, and at the same time with a community organisation that we worked with to do the research. As the relationships took time to develop, so did the paper.

​Communities of trees: notions of leadership as reciprocity

We are prompted to ask the question of CLR, who’s leading whom through data analysis and writing and should it always be a hierarchical and sustained relationship? In a community of trees there is no hierarchy of leadership as each member will have a time to lead, to follow and to be in between both. Older trees will support younger trees in or over time, and vice versa. The hard part is to know when you need to take a leadership role, when to follow and when to be in between. By in between, we mean you take your role in the process that is required for it to function as a community of researchers connected to Country. Therefore, learning how to be reciprocal in this dynamic is an essential element that unfolds in its own way, which can also be hard and/or easy. In either way, how the process unfolds can be right or wrong, with this all depending upon the relationships to communicate if it is too hard or easy for the team.

The central idea of this chapter rests on troubling the Western idea of what ‘leadership’ is as it appears in scholarship from the United Kingdom, Canada, America, Australia and New Zealand. To us, community leadership is not simply inverting a hierarchical relationship between the researcher and the researched. This is not to say that we think Western theorisation of leadership rests entirely in ideas of hero-leaders, individual leaders and personal leadership qualities. We are aware that in the 21st-century ideas of leadership as distributed and/or shared have come to proliferate (e.g. Bush, 2013; Lumby, 2013; Youngs, 2017). Distributed leadership was introduced by Spillane and colleagues in 2004:

However, over time this approach has been critiqued (e.g. Lumby, 2013) and taken in different directions. We recognise touching points between our experiences of CLR and Spillane and colleagues’ notion of reciprocal interdependencies between leaders and leaders working together in complementary ways. However, this is not completely transferable in its entirety to our CLR practice. We prefer to use Grice’s (2019) deployment of Stephen Kemmis and colleagues’ work to produce a more nuanced (and we think appropriate) interpretation and move away from owners of ‘leadership’ to co-constructed ‘leading’:

In our thinking and writing on Yuin Country, in Australia, in writing the ‘No shame’ paper, we consciously worked to avoid responsibilising and owning ‘leaders’ and ‘leadership’. What we did, we believe, is more in line with Grice’s (2019) argument of focusing on the action of co-creating ‘leading’. Whilst this description of leading is close to our practice of CLR, we don’t adopt any one notion of leadership from Western scholarship as complete because none that we found significantly drew on Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing leadership~following. Moreover, whilst distributed and shared leadership literature pays special attention to context, Country is more than context and doesn’t ‘fit’ such theorisations – we need a different way to explain our experiences of CLR. We needed a way to show what it means to follow Country’s leadership in the research process; in this way, ‘following’ can also be understood as leading and sustaining a legacy role of taking care, for example, of trees.

Reflecting on our experiences, we identify that like an ecology and community of trees, leadership was fluid and involved oscillating between taking leadership and following responsibilities. We had to ask ourselves the question, which can often be hard, ‘Is it my turn to step up or to stay put and listen?’ This question focused the gaze at self, recognising capacities from moment to moment to learn and to contribute based on skills and positionality and a shared value of reciprocity.

The term reciprocation (see also chapters by Riley & Webster et al., this volume) was imperative in our partnerships between the Aboriginal organisation that led the research at various stages to find points of connection from AIME’s protocols, our institutions and Country. Reciprocation is not just towards humans; it is with all the communities that make up Country. As Jo-Ann Archibald (1997), a First Nation woman from the Sto:lo First Nation in British Columbia, Canada, explains, reciprocation is ‘to be in harmony with oneself, others, members of the animal kingdom and other elements of nature [and] requires that First Nations people respect the gifts of each entity and establish and maintain respectful reciprocal relations with each’ (p. 78). This worldview on reciprocation in research processes could cause yet another layer of confusion for non-Indigenous researchers engaging in CLR. Therefore, as Gray and Oprescu (2016) argue from an Indigenous health research position, ‘It is important that non-Indigenous researchers become more aware of culturally safe ways in which to undertake Indigenous research and ensure that the research undertaken is appropriate, ethical and useful for participants’ (p. 464). When Indigenous peoples are connected to Country (the overall entity that births the gifting entities), being reciprocal and ethical in research from an Indigenous holistic manner, it is not only appropriate but essential to keep the relationships safe between all of the givers of gifts. This journey of working towards a respectful reciprocal research relationship and partnership that is safe with an Aboriginal organisation is often seen as a very complex issue. This research dynamic within the Western knowledge system could well be argued as complex with the competing nature and historical context of colonial practice, knowledge, processes and structural frameworks. To keep something safe a person with a good heart is required – a heart that takes care of Country – and a memory that can go back before the Industrial Revolution.

Processes of sharing leadership and reciprocity don’t function purely on an intellectual level; we are not advocating here simply for a to-do list split equitably according to ‘research’ and ‘community’ expertise. Genuine sharing and reciprocity of research leadership between research team members requires heart – an emotional investment in the purpose and value of the research undertaking and of each other. The heart has, and is, a memory (personal communication with Uncle Max Harrison, 2016). When this association between the heart and mind is understood from an Aboriginal way of knowing, the effects of colonisation and colonising and hierarchical research practices can function to obscure cultural understandings of reciprocal leadership, being and doing – as in the trees. If a Western knowledge system removes heart via insistence on traditional hierarchical research relationships (community – or researcher-led or otherwise), for Aboriginal people involved in the research it could have the effect of burying a heart and a memory. And this burying of heart and memory would restrict genuine responsibilities and capacities to take turns leading the research process. Ireland (2009) presents a First Nation Canadian worldview on the importance of heart to people’s learning spirit, as the heart is connected to the mind and body and is then a constant guide for a person in becoming who they are meant to be.

Any research relationship with heart includes a range of emotions and actions and can be understood by the term love. Love, according to Uncle Max Harrison, is ‘lots of varying emotions’ (personal communication, 2014). Doing the research, writing and review experience for the ‘No shame’ paper, we went through lots of varying emotions, in the same way that many academics do in their work, whether or not they believe they are doing community-led~reciprocal research. In the ‘No shame’ paper, our shared ‘heart’ was the protection of Aboriginal students in schools and cultural understandings of shame (baambi and baambi-mumm).2 By this we mean that our heart guided authorship to share knowledge that could assist schools and teachers to actively work to make schools less shameful and more inclusive places for Aboriginal students. This heart also included an explicit effort to ‘unbury’ and ‘unobscure’ cultural understandings and memories of shame in colonial schooling contexts and academia.

Members of the authoring team brought their own knowledge, heart and memory. In addition to shared heart for the paper, we brought unique hearts that needed to take turns in contributing to the paper’s development. This turn-taking, we suggest, is another example of research leadership as reciprocation. Reciprocation is all to do with the relationship that exists with all of the participants that are in our story – humans, trees and other entities from Country that hold knowledge. This relationship is complex because it does not want to be looked at in the easy, hard, right, wrong manner. The simplicity from an Aboriginal position is the relationship and identifying something that brings every living thing together: Country. Which leads us to a question: what are the core issues from Country that help the complex issues to become not only simple but an achievable pathway for each issue in the relationship to be healed? For us that is time, respect and trees, especially the heart of a tree: it takes time for a tree to grow and the respect we give that tree for it to grow. Kids took up ‘No shame at AIME’ often in interviews. They took a leadership role to initiate this.

​What is the role of an arborist? The university, academic freedom and economic rationalism shaping the community of trees

What we found was our enactment of CLR was not a model of community-always-leading-the-process, as the CLR title might otherwise suggest. Nor was it simply a matter of leadership being distributed; there was no central leader ‘allowing’ others to do leading roles (Lumby, 2013). The notion of community always leading was constrained via processes of co-creating leading with many leaders; leading and following positions were always and ever in respectful movement and flux throughout the process. To illustrate this, we recount in this short list below how leadership ‘moved’ from tree to tree:

1. AIME led the research by commissioning the independent evaluation and articulating what they wanted to know from that evaluation.
2. Funding bodies led (Australian Department of Education and Training), building parameters around project costs, spending, personnel and key performance indicators.
3. Researchers led consultations with AIME to support research design, instrument development, and ethics application phases of the project that would ‘fit in’ and not interrupt normal program delivery.
4. AIME and researchers worked co-operatively to organise and undertake fieldwork, respectively.
5. AIME students (mentees) led discussions of ‘No shame at AIME’. There were no questions about ‘No shame at AIME’ in the interview schedules, but students kept initiating conversations about this during semi-structured interviews.
6. Researchers led organisation of data analysis with AIME staff (two Indigenous and one non-Indigenous) and Indigenous education scholar and local Lawman (McKnight).
7. University financial services led rigorous objections to researchers spending money on accommodation and food for a four-day data analysis retreat. Conventional qualitative data analysis only costs academics’ time (or the money spent paying research assistants to manage datasets and run analyses).
8. Researchers led appeals to finance to make a sound case for a need to spend project money on a data analysis retreat that would bring researchers, AIME and community into conversation to develop shared and culturally appropriate interpretations of the ‘No shame at AIME’ data, which had thus far only been collected and thought through by non-Indigenous researchers.
9. University financial services led the approval process that made spending money for the retreat possible.
10. Country (and AIME staff) led data analysis; this process was facilitated by McKnight. This analysis process focused on developing shared and culturally informed understandings of (i) existing literature about shame in Aboriginal cultures and in Australian educational contexts and (ii) data collected during six months of national fieldwork regarding ‘No shame at AIME’ (for example, student interviews and researchers’ classroom observation notes).
11. Leadership oscillated between (i) researchers (McKnight, Country, McMahon, Harwood) preparing text and (ii) AIME authors (Priestly and Trindorfer) leading feedback on revisions, prompting further revisions, and authorising subsequent and final revisions.
12. Researchers led submission to journals.
13. Journal editorial boards and reviewers led article revision processes in terms of previous editions of the journal, setting patterns of preferred ways of constructing journal article texts and providing feedback about the work needed to shift and change in order to appeal to their readership.
14. Country and researchers (McKnight et al.) led rewriting the article in response to reviews.
15. Uncle Max Dulamunmun Harrison led the clarification around knowledge contested by the reviewer that there is no Aboriginal word for shame.
16. Australian Journal of Indigenous Education led publication of the article via their journal scope and sequence, the expertise of their reviewing panel and their publication proficiency.
17. Academics continue to lead through citations of the published work.

To have community ‘lead’ each move in the above list of research processes would be neither desirable nor ethical. If we consider non-community people in the research process as arborists that constrain~enable the larger community-led project (the community of trees) we can come to see non-community elements of CLR as necessary-destructive.

Human beings live in communities and so do trees. Therefore, when trees have been moved and then groomed by humans (arborists) you are damaging responsibility and independent behaviour that is respectful to maintain a community. The human needs are put above another community member, the tree, which affects/has effects on the human community. The trick for researchers involved in community-led projects is to discern when ‘stepping up’ into leadership positions is more a help than a hindrance and in ways that do not remove or relocate the trees.

Arguably, researchers should lead when their expertise will save community time, effort and frustration (for example, ethics applications, funding reports, submitting journal articles, arguing with finance departments). Likewise, to have researchers lead uniformly throughout this process would have been unethical and disrespectful of the community’s voices, needs and wants.

One way of understanding the necessity of these tensions involved in community leading and not leading research is to think using the story~theory of tripartation. Tripartation includes the spiritual dynamic so we can engage in knowing on a mind, body and spiritual level that is in oneness. Tripartation for McKnight is the spiritual umbilical cord that can connect binaries/dualities, instead of the Western binary that tends to separate (McKnight, 2015). Importantly, time is required to know, be and do this within research on the physical, mental and spiritual realms, which are not meant to be separated. Therefore, it is necessary to be aware of contradictions and utilise them to assist in the reduction in doing and being in research in a way that is respectful to both knowledge systems. Tripartation enabled our understanding of CLR as a number of contradictions (in terms of partioscillating and reciprocal leadership between many parties), and utilising a two-knowledge approach. It provided space in our thinking to identify, explain what we could, and to be aware that we struggled and missed some elements amongst the difficulties and benefits of researching in two knowledge systems.

The process of using tripartation as a way of ‘doing’ CLR requires patience to allow time for spirit to come through. Patience can contribute to reducing the immediacy effect of Western knowledge, which can restrict Aboriginal knowledge approaches that are full of silence to see Country talk without voice (Harrison & McConchie, 2009; McKnight, 2015). This includes the community having time to deliberate as a community of knowledge holders. This did and can include non-Aboriginal people if they are allowed to have the time to do the learning within the research context. The importance of time is a constant theme throughout this edited volume. Using the above list of times and spaces where different people led the ‘Community-Led’ Research and to show how this turn-taking enabled-restrained, and made easy and difficult, we offer now an elaboration of one item on the list – point 15.

For example (at point 15 in the list above), regarding conversations with community members, we can talk specifically about one conversation led by Uncle Max when responding to a reviewer’s assertion that there was no Aboriginal word for shame. Using tripartation, we can see these things in relationship as at once constraining~enabling. When reviewers led with negative and what seemed unhelpful assertions that there was no Aboriginal word for shame, this both constrained the progress of the article to publication but also enabled us to ask better questions in our conversations with Uncle Max and to seek old answers. Likewise, our conversation with Uncle Max enabled new learning for us, a path forward to publication and ways to recognise constrictions in our own thinking (that is, just because we can’t see or don’t know something doesn’t mean it is not there). This conversation also worked to constrain the power of the reviewer’s criticisms levelled at us. In working in this space of constraint-enabling and using tripartation, we avoided making either the reviewer or Uncle Max or ourselves right or wrong. In this moment of CLR it was right~wrong, easy~difficult, enabled~constrained. But this process took time and patience, with an overarching practice of respect for all involved.

To further explain the importance of time (timing), and to show how researchers can be followers, we tell a brief ‘back-story’ about this conversation with Uncle Max. We had submitted to a journal and received a really negative review. One of the authors (Harwood) had recommended that we delay preparing any response to this until after McKnight had submitted his PhD. In hindsight, this was an important temporal break. When we did sit down to prepare a response, the researchers were not leading but were following the thinking prompts provided by the reviewer: that there was no Aboriginal word for shame. The timing of this conversation with Uncle Max was pivotal. We spoke with him only two days after he got a memory (a spiritual email3) about shame, and so he was perfectly positioned to have that conversation at that time. Had we tried to respond to the reviewers any earlier, the conversation with Uncle Max would have been different. That all things happen in their right time is a central cultural understanding and one that challenges Western understandings of time as linear – the ideas that underpin research ‘timelines’ and ‘milestones’:

Uncle Max’s memory and our asking questions about shame happened in a pattern and system of energy that connected them to occur in their right time, and this was respected by the authoring team. In this context, respect is easy~difficult and could be right~wrong depending on the circumstances. For example, we also must respect~challenge Western ‘deadlines’. In delaying the response to the reviewers in this story, intentionally or because of prompts from patterns and systems of energy, we took a risk in the current publish-or-perish climate familiar to universities everywhere, but we also respected things happening in their own time. This respect for time in the research process was right~wrong, easy~difficult, and in looking at ‘both sides of these tilde’ this tripartation approach has the potential to facilitate community research in decolonising ways.

​Concluding and enduring questions for ‘community-led’ data analysis and authorship

We had an easy answer to most difficult questions, but communicating an easy answer was difficult when you look at everything in connection. The question was easy as we could go to the community to ask the difficult question; the difficulty was if the answer did not meet Western thinking or the academy’s political posturing of knowledge. ‘Answers’ from community sometimes can be viewed as too ‘simplistic’ and under-theorised to report directly as research findings. Then it becomes difficult.

Easy and difficult are intertwined, not a binary. Just going to the Aboriginal community is not easy when university protocols don’t match Aboriginal protocols (and vice versa). It can also be seen as easy if you do not work with the community. But if this is the case, the difficulty comes when the research does not meet university Aboriginal ethical or consultation protocols or when the Aboriginal community notes and negatively reacts to lack of consultation and partnership. However, for the Aboriginal academic or the non-Aboriginal academic who knows the ‘right’ thing to do and the protocols to follow, avoiding consultation is not considered the ‘easy way’; we know that starting badly ends badly. When is it right to go to the community and when is it wrong to go to the community? When is it wrong to give our academic responsibilities to the community who may or may not be getting any reciprocation? How do we describe and justify the benefits of the research? Is this reciprocation or CLR?

It is easy to ask a question but hard to know the right way to analyse the answer when you place a theory onto it. Will theory converse with story (and vice versa) and does it need to or will it stand on its own? Do we find a connection to get both a right and a wrong answer to a question that is both easy and hard to figure out? Therefore, what is the middle ground of these questions and answers, in a third space that is mobile and dynamic? Are we answering the question to please the community, or the university, or the funding body? Or, are we answering the question on how we (I) the researcher sees the answer?

So how do we navigate what is easy, difficult, right and wrong? Whilst we have no answers, we have a few driving questions that should propel us through our future research:

• How can academics do a better job of ‘connecting’ research interests with community interests and work? And why should/shouldn’t this happen? Will researchers listen to when community want and don’t want academic research?
• How can we reform the research relationship and how research questions are identified by positioning Country as the focus?
• How can academics resist researching communities and instead trust that communities already have the ‘answers’ to their questions? In doing this, can researchers and communities instead turn the Western academic research foci to co-investigations of the societal, institutional and policy structures that enable and constrain communities’ answers? For example, the Australian Aboriginal community already has the framework for resolving problems through stories from Country.
• How can universities learn to ‘walk the talk’ in resourcing high-impact, high-usefulness research for communities?
• How can academic communities (funding bodies, universities etc.) adjust expectations around the time required to work respectfully with communities?
• How can academics push and agitate the conventions of reporting brief methodology sections in academic journals so that the importance of method in community research gains ‘scholarly traction’?
• How can academics challenge discourses of ‘credibility’ and ‘impartiality’ in analysis so as to involve ‘community’ in authentic data analysis and reporting of findings?

CLR is right, wrong, easy and difficult.

​Acknowledgements

In addition to all the people who were involved in writing the ‘No shame at AIME’ paper (McKnight et al., 2019), we would also like to thank Dr Christine Grice and Ann Leaf for pointing us in the direction of some very helpful reading regarding distributed and shared leadership in educational contexts.

​References