Collaborative Storytelling: Meeting Indigenous Peoples' Desires for Self-Determination in Research.

Maori and other indigenous peoples are concerned about the power and control that non-indigenous people hold over research. Research issues such as initiation, benefits, representation, legitimation, and accountability have usually been determined by the researcher's interests and agenda. One means of addressing indigenous peoples' desire for self-determination in educational research is to develop collaborative storytelling as a research approach. Such an approach, when conducted within indigenous ways of knowing, facilitates ongoing collaborative analysis and construction of meaning about participants' lived experiences. Collaborative stories are selected, recollected, and reflected on by research participants (including the researcher), then merged to create a collaborative text--a mutually constructed story created out of the lived experiences of all participants. Five collaborative research projects conducted by the bicultural research group of the University of Otago (New Zealand) are described. These projects involved: (1) representing Otago Maori parents' aspirations for their children's education to national policy makers; (2) addressing systemic change through "spiral discourse" within a College of Education; (3) developing a reading tutoring procedure and offering it to Maori groups as a traditional "koha"--a gift that may be accepted or refused; (4) family history and genealogy; and (5) evaluating characteristics of Maori programs in mainstream schools that indicate success. These examples demonstrate how the researchers became located within new"story-lines" that used metaphor and imagery from the research participants' domain. (Contains 39 references.) (Author/SV)