Towards Building an Indigenous Knowledge Platform to Enable Culturally-Sensitive Education Underpinned by Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (TPACK)
Alfredo Terzoli, Eastern Cape, Mamello Thinyane · 2014
The everyday use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) is ingrained to the fabric of today’s society. A question open for debate is whether this use is or can be optimized to engender authentic solutions, which are aligned to the natural environment of the people? In this paper, we examine at the question from the vantage point of educating the rural African child. We engage with the sub-question: can ICTs facilitate education grounded in people's own realities, especially those of the marginalized rural poor? We believe this is possible under specific conditions, which include making Indigenous Knowledge (IK) readily available. We propose building an ICT platform that allows injection of IK into the education process: develop a solution that valorizes IK, but also supports efforts to use ICTs in education driven by Technology, Pedagogy, and Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework. The main goal of this framework is to facilitate effective teaching with technology. TPACK partially embeds IK within pedagogical knowledge and ‘contexts’ of learning; we argue for explicit inclusion of IK within the framework to complement the other knowledges.