The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact, globally, ‘upending the lives of children and families’ (UNICEF 2020a), but its impact on education has been particularly far reaching. Furthermore, it has widened the gap between those already disadvantaged, creating what UNICEF (2020b) has referred to as ‘double jeopardy’, whereby those who have already been left behind become further left behind. At the same time, the pandemic represents an opportunity to rethink education and to identify mechanisms to support and enhance accessibility so to further the reach of inclusive policies and practices. Digital technologies have clearly been central to these aims, and appear in many cases to have increased accessibility and reached more children and young people, as suggested by international and sovranational organisation such as the UNESCO Global Education Coalition, the European Union with its Digital Education Plan 2021-2027, and the OECD with its focus on ‘inclusive recovery’. 

Traditionally, inclusive technologies are intended as instruments that enter an individual’s bodily deficit so as to allow participation to the main curriculum (Hayhoe, 2014). In this sense, inclusive digital technologies are rehabilitative, adaptive and corrective towards a normal modality of teaching and learning, tailored on an individual’s body or ‘life case’. However, the pandemic has accelerated a process of ‘mainstreaming’ digital technologies, making them the norm rather than requirements for a minority of pupils that need to be included in regular education (Williamson et alii, 2020.). 

By deploying Foucault’s definition of technologies, intended ‘as methods for governing human beings’ (Behrent, 2013, 55), and Digital Network Ethnography as an analytical digitally situated and material set of ethnographic methods (Landri, 2013), the study investigates digital technologies’ entanglements, mediations and productive effects on inclusive digital and remote education during the pandemic. In this sense, technologies as techniques and vehicles of power materialise networks of subjects, institutions, pedagogic tools, strategies and pronouncement allowing for the investigation of productivity and creativity of power. On the one hand, this incites towards new local inclusive modalities of doing teaching and learning, new subjectivities, and aggregations; on the other hand it produces new forms of global social control through visibility and ‘force[s] to act in coordination with one another’ (Behrent, 2013, 84), subjecting students’ bodies both to ‘a system of supervision and to procedures of normalization’ (Foucault, 2006, 57). 

Being aware of the two-fold nature of digital technologies, and questioning the Global North epistemic tradition in shaping current understandings of inclusion and possible post-pandemic futures, the study investigates how digital technologies have been successful in promoting and enacting inclusion of all pupils in distant teaching and learning during the Covid-19 pandemic. It seeks to add ‘new analytical and empirical accounts of interaction, mediation, hybridization between technology, objects, standands and learners’ (Network28 call) by presenting preliminary findings from two case-studies in public schools in the United Kingdom and Italy focusing in particular on disadvantaged and disabled children. By drawing upon interviews with parents and teachers and policy document analysis. it aims to contribute to rethink current understanding of inclusion by visualising the intersection of global policies with local solutions through, illustrating how digital technologies i) moulded, conducted, and produced new forms of accessibility to learning, ii) mobilised creative forms of inclusive learning and novel improvised pedagogical techniques, and iii)reshaped social relations between teachers, pupils and their families. 

The research analyses the multilevel and intersected nature of global and local approaches to digital technologies and challenges a monolithic and Western-centred approach to inclusive education by mobilising three main methodological-analytical sets of methods ‘to research emerging learning environments’ (Network28 call): i) documentary and policy analyses including international policy documents and recommendations, and national and local guidelines; ii) semi-structured interviews with key informants identified on an international level; and teachers and parents from the inclusive case-studies, thus gaining insights both from a global perspective on technologies and hegemonic approaches to digital teaching and learning; and from a school and community level. This enables a closer discussion with teachers and parents to understand what practices worked, what did not, how inclusion has been enacted with the resources, abilities, and local expertise available, and how social relations have been changed and fashioned by this; iii) Digital Network Ethnography, which is used to connect and visualise data from document and web analysis and interviews through networks, which analytically connect resources, practices, people and solutions both on global and local levels, with the intent to ‘extend the public sphere, empowering communities and cultivating inclusive policy making’ (Davies, 2011, 2) and teaching and learning practices. Building on the increasing attention given to the emergence of heterarchies in global education networks and the role of international organisation in setting global digital agendas (Williamson and Hogan, 2020; Au and Ferrare, 2015), this analytical method merges Policy Network Ethnography (Ball and Junemann, 2013; Avelar and Ball, 2019) and Jessop et alii’s (2008) Territory, Places, Scales, and Network (TPSN) approach to look beyond and within national borders and observe the working of globalisation on inclusive education practices; and situational analysis in digital and non-digital contexts (Clarke et al. 2015; Decupeyre, 2019, Landri, 2013), exploring the networked character of inclusive approaches within the two case-studies. This analytical level moves from a perspective on teachers, students and parents and their use of digital technologies as individual agents, shedding light on how ‘most power forms cannot be reduced to or explained in terms of individual intentions’ (Behrent, 2013, 65) as bases to develop a model to assess the effectiveness of technologies for inclusion in multiple contexts while respecting and promoting local successes.

In these swiftly changing times, in which the present seems to unfold more quickly than the future, this paper aims to contribute to the critical investigation of inclusive approaches to digital technologies in two intersected modalities. First, it exposes the hegemonic role of international organisations in shaping agendas through Euro-Centric and Westernised epistemic understandings and operational modalities of inclusion of ‘vulnerable’ and ‘disadvantaged’ children in digital educational contexts; second, it provides novel perspectives on digital inclusive technologies by visualising ‘case-study‘ and their mobilisation of subjects, institutions, local resources, culture, expertise and contextual constraints in the use of digital technologies. The outcomes of the study are expected to have relevance internationally and inform change in management in educational practice, both on a global and local level, benefitting a number of stakeholders within and beyond educational institutions, specifically i)Teachers: by stimulating discussion across global approaches and local solutions, and reflections on contextual constraints in informing digital and non-digital pedagogical practices; ii)Pupils: by providing insights on how inclusive ways of learning have been shaped by the swift move to remote and digital learning; iii)Parents: by taking actively their voices into accounts they contribute to build on the strengths of what worked in inclusive practices and becoming active parts into pedagogy and learning processes; iv) Sociologies of education academic community: by exploring local and global connections and networks of digital and non-digital technological approaches to inclusive education, the study benefits the Sociologies of Education community by providing new education ontologies and digital epistemologies in forms of inclusive pedagogy networks, by advancing analytical tools to rethink and further the widely debated approach to inclusive education; and by stimulating debate into new analytical methodologies in research digital networks and social change, attempting to answer to the Network28’s call for ‘new modes of reflexive sociological inquiry’.

Au, W.; Ferrare, J.J. (2015). Mapping Corporate Education Reform: Power and Policy Networks in the Neoliberal State. Routledge. Avelar, M.; Ball, S. J. (2019). Mapping new philanthropy and the heterarchical state: The Mobilization for the National Learning Standards in Brazil. International Journal of Educational Development, 64, 65-73. Ball, S. J.; Junemann, C. (2012). Networks, new governance and education. Bristol: Polity Press. Behrent, M. C. (2013) Foucault and Technology, History and Technology, 29(1), 54-104, DOI: 10.1080/07341512.2013.780351 Clarke, Adele; Friese, Carrie and Washburn Rachel, (eds.) (2015). Situational analysis in practice: mapping research with grounded theory. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. Davies, J. S. (2011). Challenging governance theory. From networks to hegemony. Bristol: University of Bristol Polity Press Decuypere, M. (2019). Researching educational apps: ecologies, technologies, subjectivities and learning regimes. Learning, Media and Technology, 44(4), 414-429. EU Commission, (2020). Digital Education Action Plan 2021-2027: Resetting education and training for the digital age. EU Communication 20 September 2020, Retrievable at https://ec.europa.eu/education/education-in-the-eu/digital-education-action-plan_en [Last accessed 24th January 2021] Foucault, M. (2006). Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the College de France, 1973- 1974. (G. Burchell, Trans.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hayhoe, S. (2014). The need for inclusive accessible technologies for students with disabilities and learning difficulties. In: Burke, L., (ed.) Learning in a Digitalized Age: Plugged in, Turned on, Totally Engaged?. John Catt Educational Publishing, Melton, UK, pp. 257-274. Jessop, B.; Brenner, N.; Jones, M. (2008). Theorizing sociospatial relations. In Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 26, 389-401 Landri, P. (2013) Mobilising ethnographers investigating technologised learning, Ethnography and Education, 8:2, 239-254, DOI: 10.1080/17457823.2013.792512 UNESCO. (2020). Global Education Coalition. UNESCO, Retrievable at https://en.unesco.org/covid19/educationresponse/globalcoalition [Last accessed 24th January 2021] UNICEF, (2020a). COVID-19 resources for policymakers and front-line workers. Retrievable at https://www.unicef.org/coronavirus/covid-19-resources-policymakers-front-line-workers [Last accessed, 24th January 2021] UNICEF (2020b). Don’t let children be the hidden victims of COVID-19 pandemic. Retrievable at https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/dont-let-children-be-hidden-victims-covid-19-pandemic [Last accessed 24th January 2021] Williamson, B.; Hogan, A. (2020). Commercialisation and Privatisation in/of education in the context of Covid-19. Education International Research: Education International. Williamson, B.; Eynon, R.; Potter, J. (2020) Pandemic politics, pedagogies and practices: digital technologies and distance education during the coronavirus emergency, Learning, Media and Technology, 45(2), 107-114, DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2020.1761641