When Sense-Making Doesn't Make Sense: Dervin's Sense-Making Methodology Applied to the Question of Non-Māori Librarians in New Zealand Making Sense of Māori Knowledge

The use of DERVIN's sense-making methodology in a study of non-Māori librarians learning about and engaging with mātauranga Māori [Māori knowledge] led to a number of useful findings, but also revealed a raft of methodological challenges. These showed that DERVIN's sense-making is not the best approach to investigating majority culture individuals engaging with the knowledge of Indigenous or other minoritised cultures. There were some challenges with the gap phase of the sense-making metaphor of situation-gap-bridge-outcome. These include artificial and anticipated gaps, avoided gaps, and gaps that are fully or partially invisible to the sense-maker. Other problems included sense-makers seeing their journeys differently to that described by the sense-making metaphor, and the linearity of it. These concerns all point to the central challenge for the use of sense-making for investigating non-Māori engagement with Māori knowledge—that the framework was produced from a Western cultural perspective, and thus reflects a very individualistic view of information behaviour.