High temperature non-Newtonian materials processing provides a stimulating area for process engineering simulation. Motivated by emerging applications in this area, the present article investigates the time-dependent free convective flow of a chemically-reacting micropolar fluid from a vertical plate oscillating in its own plane adjacent to a porous medium. Thermal radiative, viscous dissipation and wall couple stress effects are included. The Rosseland diffusion approximation is used to model uni-directional radiative heat flux in the energy equation. Darcy's model is adopted to mimic porous medium drag force effects. The governing twodimensional conservation equations are normalized with appropriate variables and transformed into a dimensionless, coupled, nonlinear system of partial differential equations under the assumption of low Reynolds number. The governing boundary value problem is then solved under physically viable boundary conditions numerically with a finite element method based on the weighted residual approach. Graphical illustrations for velocity, micro-rotation (angular velocity), temperature and concentration are obtained as functions of the emerging physical parameters i.e. thermal radiation, viscous dissipation, first order chemical reaction parameter etc. Furthermore, friction factor (skin friction), surface heat transfer and mass transfer rates have been tabulated quantitatively for selected thermo-physical parameters. A comparison with previously published paper is made to check the validity and accuracy of the present finite element solutions under some limiting cases and excellent agreement is attained. Additionally, a mesh independence study is conducted. The model is relevant to reactive polymeric materials processing simulation.