Mainstreaming Indigenous knowledge in/through media and information literacy: A basis for a decolonised task design

Abstract

This critical qualitative inquiry sought to examine and understand how academic authors as curriculum implementors and media producers incorporated Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous media in the design and development of textbook tasks for media and information literacy instructional materials. This is based on the fundamental assumption that a textbook as a communication artifact is deeply implicated in the history and politics of inequality, exclusion, and elitism, marginalising and invisibilising Indigenous paradigms, policies and practices. As an analytical lens, Henry Giroux’s transformative construct of “border pedagogy” was employed in making sense of how Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous media are instantiated and represented for analysis, adoption and action-taking. This research also utilised critical discourse analysis and close reading in examining the student tasks as text and the broader development ecology as the social context. In view of the text in its dialectical context, the study revealed a set of co-orienting and interanimating themes that can be summarised as critical knowledge management, critical technology, place-based activism, role of community elders, critical sense-making, language preservation, systemic injustice, critical rootedness, and community-based praxis, foregrounding the potential of these selected instructional materials in exposing community threats, opposing structural forces and proposing empowering alternatives.