Trialling Playworld Translanguaging through an ethically grounded research partnership with an Aboriginal community school

Playworld Translanguaging (Oakley et al., 2025) was conceptualised as an approach for multilingual early childhood education in response to a lack of research and practical guidelines to inform the integration of two powerful pedagogical approaches, namely Pedagogical Translanguaging and Conceptual PlayWorlds. During a year-long Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) in an Aboriginal community school in remote northern Western Australia working with the highly endangered Bardi Jawi language, researchers worked alongside the school's early years teacher, Aboriginal teacher assistant, and their class to trial Playworld Translanguaging . Central to its implementation was the development of an ethically grounded research partnership that was guided by the AIATSIS Code of Ethics for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research (2020). Using collaborative autoethnography, we present a narrative account detailing how the AIATSIS Code of Ethics was adopted, and present findings that illustrate participants' perspectives on how an ethically grounded research partnership was developed. These include ensuring that the different experiences, knowledges, perspectives and roles of people within the partnership are valued and treated as equal, and developing structures to support this, such as the CPAR model, research agreements, and opportunities to engage in critical reflection. This structure allowed for us to consciously build relationships, jointly navigate tensions and challenges, exercise reflexivity, be vulnerable and create trust. In sharing our findings and reflections we hope that future researchers will seek partnerships as a foundation to their research in school settings with Indigenous peoples.