Integrating Indigenous Knowledge into Science Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics using Virtual Space: A Mission Impossible?

While South African curricula require the incorporation of Indigenous Knowledge (IK) into Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), it is not clear what IK educators should include in STEM. The onus is on lecturers to decide what exactly should be taught and what pedagogy to use. The purpose of this discourse is to explore the integration of IK into Western knowledge (WK) using virtual space. The discourse is about the challenges of using virtual space to increase the applicability of IK in STEM subjects at schools and institutions of higher learning. These challenges emanate from IK being tacit and not digitized, place-specific, and incompatibility with WK. The IK knowledge is with custodians who share it with their few selected children, which makes it less accessible to schools. Also, because of a lack of curriculum clarity of what is available either in print or in digital formats that can be taught and assessed, there is a lack of skills in IK teaching, educators’ negative attitudes towards IK, and a lack of learning materials to support learning. Despite these challenges, the Information, Communication, Distribution, and Transaction (ICDT) model and the Indigenous Institutional Theory (ITT) can be blended, forming Valorizing Indigenous Knowledge (VIK) to integrate IK in STEM. Hence, the impossible mission can be possible.