From Bakaba to Nonfiction Books: Minangkabau Cultural Literacy through the Pancasila Student Profile Project

Abstract

Local wisdom can become a decorative project theme unless students are required to investigate, represent, and communicate cultural knowledge. This qualitative secondary analysis examines Suduik Bakaba Minangkabau, a local-wisdom Pancasila Student Profile Strengthening Project (P5) implemented in an Indonesian senior secondary school. The archived thesis corpus had previously supported a publication on the project's general implementation; the present study asks a distinct question about cultural-literacy practices and learning artifacts. Data from observations, interviews, project documents, student products, and project assessment materials were reanalyzed thematically. The original thesis identified informants through knowledge of and direct involvement in the project but did not provide a single consolidated final count, so no unsupported participant total is reconstructed. Findings show that the project transformed local culture through five pedagogical moves: cultural topics became objects of inquiry; students learned an explicit nonfiction-writing sequence; 15-25-page books converted collected information into authored knowledge; digital infographics recontextualized written work into visual communication; and a public panen karya gave the artifacts an authentic audience. Teacher coordinators, facilitators, monitoring, feedback, and assessment provided scaffolding that made student agency accountable rather than unstructured. The study contributes a cultural-literacy interpretation of P5: local wisdom becomes pedagogically powerful when students do intellectual work on culture by locating, selecting, writing, revising, designing, and publicly communicating knowledge.