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This paper is a set of reflections from researchers in the Center for Sustainable Communities, University of Canberra, drawing out emerging lessons from the process of re-configuring research methods during COVID-19. The pandemic has presented new spaces of negotiation, struggle, and interdependence within research projects and research teams. It has left researchers often uncertain about how to do their work effectively. At the same time, it has opened up opportunities to re-think how researchers undertake the work of research. In this paper we reflect on several current research programs that have had to undergo rapid design shifts to adjust to new conditions under COVID-19. The rapid shift has afforded some surprisingly positive outcomes and raised important questions for the future. In our reflections we look at the impact of COVID-19 at different stages of designing research with partners, establishing new relationships with partners and distant field sites, and data collection and analysis. We draw on Participatory Action Research (PAR) methodological ideas and highlight ways in which we have adapted and experimented with PAR methods during the pandemic. We reflect on the aspects of PAR that have assisted us to continue in our work, in particular, how PAR foregrounds diverse ways of knowing, being and doing, and prioritizes local aspirations, concerns and world views to drive the research agenda and the processes of social or economic change that accompany it. PAR also helps us to reflect on methods for building relationships of mutual trust, having genuine and authentic collaborations, and open conversations. We reflect on the potential lessons for PAR and community engaged research more generally. Amidst the challenges, our experience reveals new pathways for research practice to rebalance power relationships and support local place-conscious capacity for action.

Journalistic news values and digital technology align with education policy and practice to construct a narrow world of Indigenous educational achievement and contribute to a discourse of negativity, failure and disempowerment. Digital technologies have enabled the online publication of educational performance that is a valuable source of news for journalists and editors. In this virtual world, Indigenous students are numerically ranked and publicly compared to their 'mainstream' peers. Despite significant criticism of the educational trend towards high-stakes testing and league tables there has been little investigation into the role of news media in the reporting of Australia's National Assessment Program-Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). This article takes a media studies lens to examine the measurement and comparison of Indigenous school performance through the online publication of NAPLAN results and the My School website. A textual analysis of 143 news reports about Australian Indigenous students' NAPLAN results over an eightyear period from 2010 to 2017 found that Australia's news media told the story of Indigenous educational performance through a language of measurement and failure. This focus on deficit metrics fails to question the underlying assumptions of educational testing and comparison and perpetuates a discourse of deficit in Indigenous education.

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