Highdigenous Pedagogy: Aesthetic Engagement as Epistemological Bridge in African Learning Communities

Sub-Saharan Africa faces a structural youth employment crisis: 10–12 million young people enter the workforce annually while only 3 million formal jobs are created, leaving 77–85% in informal employment. Conventional responses, such as expanding formal Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) or adopting Northern skills frameworks, have produced disappointing results. This paper introduces highdigenous pedagogy, an approach that synthesizes high-technology capabilities with indigenous knowledge systems through aesthetic engagement. Drawing on mixed-methods analysis of 504 learner portfolio entries and task reflections from 122 participants at Kabakoo Academies in Bamako, Mali (2023–2025), we examine how aesthetic scaffolding, i.e. using learners’ existing aesthetic sensibilities as foundations for capability development, operates in practice. Quantitative lexical analysis reveals that aesthetic discourse functions across multiple registers: design vocabulary dominates task artifacts, while portfolio entries emphasize cultural grounding and self-work. Cluster analysis identifies six discourse families, with one embodying the cultural-technological synthesis central to highdigenous pedagogy. Qualitative analysis reveals three mechanisms through which aesthetic scaffolding operates: epistemological legitimation, cultural-technological synthesis, and dignified aspiration formation. These findings extend ethnocomputing scholarship by demonstrating how aesthetic engagement enables synthesis between indigenous knowledge systems and digital capabilities, and provide empirical support for recent reconceptualizations of culturally responsive pedagogy in African contexts as fundamentally concerned with decolonization through heritage restoration. We argue that approaches treating aesthetic sensibility as epistemological foundation, rather than soft skill or enrichment, may offer more promising pathways for youth capability development than conventional competency frameworks.