From print to algorithm: teaching Indonesian postcolonial fiction with critical algorithmic literacy

Purpose This study examines how Indonesian postcolonial fiction – principally Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Bumi Manusia [This Earth of Mankind] and Laksmi Pamuntjak's Amba – was taught across print, digitised and algorithmically mediated environments in two undergraduate English Language Teaching (ELT) literature courses in Surakarta and Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and what teaching critical algorithmic literacy looks like in such courses.Design/methodology/approach A qualitative multiple-case study drew on Indonesian postcolonial criticism, cultural memory studies and work on algorithmic and AI literacy, distinguishing three layers of mediation: digitised reading, algorithmic curation and generative AI. Data comprised classroom observation, instructor interviews, student focus groups and interviews, reflective journals and student-produced ‘feed audits’, analysed through reflexive thematic analysis by an author team that includes the courses’ own teacher.Findings Print-first close reading supported textual warranting and cultural-memory work; students perceived recommendation panels as foregrounding Anglophone titles over Indonesian ones; instructor-designed counter-searches and feed audits made algorithmic curation an object of critique; digital tools supported translanguaging across Bahasa Indonesia, Javanese and English when paired with evaluation criteria; and hybrid sequencing was valued but labour-intensive.Originality/value The study's innovation is pedagogical rather than technological: a resource-aware, print-first sequence of feed audits, Indonesian-language counter-searches, checklists for generative AI output and evidence ladders that turns algorithms into objects of literary inquiry. It brings Indonesian literary criticism and language politics into dialogue with algorithmic literacy and identifies the conditions under which such teaching may be sustainable in Indonesian higher education.