Indigenising Knowledge Base for Consequential Education in Ethiopia – A Conceptual Model

The uniqueness of Ethiopian socio-cultural environment creates challenges for teachers and scholars due to the questionable accuracy and applicability of Euro-American theories and concepts that are being taught in various disciplines in Ethiopia. How far cross-cultural theories have soundness for universal application? How far Euro-American theories are unassailable in Ethiopian cultural context? These are some of the exigent questions often raised by scholarly teachers, educationists as well as critical students in search of consequential education. Consequential education is a process of learning where the teacher encourages critical examination of multiple sources of knowledge and theories in diverse learning styles with the intention that the acquired knowledge is centred, located, oriented, and grounded on the learner’s culture, which could be applied, translated appropriately by the learner and thus be well equipped to be productive locally and globally. In view of enhancing consequential education by indigenising the local knowledge base in Ethiopia, the objectives of this paper are twofold: i) Identify key constructs, components and obstacles for indigenising Ethiopian knowledge base; ii) Prepare a conceptual model of indigenization for consequential education in Ethiopia. This qualitative study used a mixture of ethnography and phenomenology methods to collect data. Specifically, Delphi debate, brainstorming, storytelling/informal conversation and document analysis were used. The study identified many local cultural constructs that need extensive research so that local knowledge base could be established and local theories formulated. In view of this, the need for qualitative Ethiocentric (Ethiopia based) research is highlighted. A few myths were spotted out that are the barriers to indigenising knowledge base in Ethiopia. Inspired by the findings, the authors propose a Pyramid Model of Indigenization for Consequential Education in Ethiopia.