Achieving inclusive and equitable quality education is recognised as crucial to global sustainable development. Internationally, much research has been conducted to explore policies and practices to effectively support diversity in educational systems and many meaningful and transformative insights have been gained (Ainscow, 2015; Hernández-Torrano et al., 2020). Nevertheless, substantial questions remain about the role digital technologies may play in promoting the agenda of inclusive education, given that the use of technology for teaching and learning has not only greatly increased as a result of the recent pandemic, but has also amplified the prevalence of automated decision-making in classrooms (Selwyn et al., 2023).
While established inclusive education research has tended to focus on human relationships rather than technology (Knox et al., 2019), the growing ability of powerful data-driven systems to actively shape the education sector, from policy and governance to the professional role of the teacher, serious attention must now be given to the potential impact of current and future technologies on the inclusive education agenda. Conversely, the research and development of digital technology in education has tended to overlook issues of inclusion, often adopting solutionist and reductionist approaches that position digital technologies as a ‘technical fix’ for increased performativity and measurement, as well as encompassing a broad de-professionalisation of the teacher (Watters, 2013). As such, digital technologies tend towards the standardisation of education provision, rather than the valuing of diversity (Knox et al., 2019).
Responding to recent examinations of the extent to which digital technologies may perpetuate inequality, biases, divides, and exclusion (e.g., Goodley et al., 2020), this panel aims to bring together researchers in inclusive education and critical digital education in order to address this substantive gap in the literature. We argue that the lack of a more critical and in-depth examination of how digital technologies intersect with inclusive education is a pressing matter to steer the current development and usage of digital technologies to support inclusion and minimise marginalisation.
The research questions the symposium will explore are:
- How can digital technologies be better designed to address key barriers to inclusive education?
- How might digital technologies reinforce or even aggravate marginalisation and exclusion in education?
- What are the possible strategies of negotiating the tensions between digital technologies and inclusive education?
The symposium includes a group of international researchers, who have been at the forefront of exploring the intersections of digital technologies and inclusive education through empirical and theoretical research that considers a range of national contexts including Singapore, Australia, UK and China. The discussant has leading expertise of international perspectives on inclusive educational development. The presenters and the discussant will together discuss and articulate explicitly some of the connections and divergences between the key arguments relating to the parallel development of digital technologies and inclusive education. The symposium aims to stimulate productive conversations between the less connected research communities in the fields of inclusive education and digital technologies, to inform shared understandings, ethical practices, and future interdisciplinary research in this emerging space.
