Indigenous Knowledge and Skills in Contexts: Integrating Local Cultural Assets into Higher Education in Nepal

This paper examines the role of indigenous knowledge and indigenous skills that constitute valuable cultural and intellectual resources for a meaningful educational transformation. However, their inadequate acknowledgement in Nepal’s formal education system has broadened the gap between academic knowledge and community-based experiences. This paper explores the significance of combining local cultural assets into higher education and examines how community knowledge-supported pedagogies can facilitate their preservation and educational practices. Adopting a qualitative research design with narrative storytelling and an ethnographic outlook, the study draws on semi-structured interviews held between January and March 2025 with 23 purposively selected, representing from local governments, artists, geologists, indigenous community members, and educators from Parbat, Baglung, Myagdi, Kathmandu, Lalitpur, and Tribhuvan University. The findings reveal that the community knowledge in the traditional crafts, folk performances, literary creation, architectural practices, ecological observations, indigenous skills, and locally built approaches to managing the natural resources. However, these resources remain insufficiently merged into the formal curricula. Drawing on Freire’s dialogic pedagogy and Vygotsky’s socio-cultural theory, the paper outlines the educational value of integrating the community experiences with a collaborative learning. It offers an e-learning subsystem within a collaborative instructional framework to combine the local cultural knowledge with digital technologies. The study concludes that the context-responsive curricula and technology-driven pedagogies can strengthen the culturally grounded, inclusive, and participatory higher education while preserving and revitalizing Nepal’s indigenous knowledge systems.