Indigenous-Led Yarning Circles Using Live Miro Boards: Encouraging Critical and Inclusive Discourse on Cultural Heritage

This position paper describes and reflects on two years of an iterative process of introducing Indigenous ways of knowledge sharing known as yarning, combined with visual thinking, and design futuring methods [9], using the live Miro boards. In an effort to embrace Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing [16] in the culture of The University of Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning (ADP), a group of academics proposed a monthly in-person Yarning Circle for all members of the school to engage with. Yarning Circles have proven to elevate Indigenous voices and sharing methods in a variety of ways in both in-person and online spaces [5-7, 12, 13, 18, 20, 21] and the simple interactive platform of Miro, adapted for Yarning Circles due to COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, was incredibly successful in encouraging participation. Miro enabled staff and students from diverse cultural backgrounds to share alternative narratives and viewpoints alongside one another in the form of written questions, personal stories, photos, and links to videos. Participants who may otherwise have remained silent in an in-person Yarning session. This resulted in a richer and safer user experience when issues of cultural heritage in relationship to Country were accessed and discussed. Participants engaged with sensitive propositions in discrete ways that best suited them in their chosen environments. The human computer interaction necessitated by the COVID-19 lockdowns for our Yarning Circles actually increased the inclusiveness of cultural heritage relating to Country, and computer mediated interaction with it. This adapted digital platform created a rich environment for critical inquiry, decolonization, First Nations-specific cultural competency, and ethics relating to engaging as architects, urban planners, geographers, and designers on stolen Aboriginal land.