This research emerged from the researcher’s experiences as a parent of a child with various labels, including Down syndrome. The researcher’s son is marginalised by many of our dominant communication forms. The spoken word is a particular barrier. He does, however, know how to search the internet, use cameras, powerpoint, speech recognition, subtitles and phone applications. As a family WhatsApp has been an endless source of delight and surprise. His family have shared numerous videos and still pictures of their lives since they found out that their son enjoyed using digital cameras. Over the last decade the main medium for his expression has been WhatsApp. But the family could not get schools and colleges to adopt this medium as an educational and communication tool. Reasons given included:

• policies about privacy, use of mobile phones, Wi-Fi and YouTube;
• concerns about equitable access to equipment, lack of training, damage to expensive technology. (Rix, 2023)

The background to this challenge is a long period of investment in information technology which has not brought the anticipated returns (Twining, 2008). Despite all the claims about the potential benefits of these technologies there is clearly still a digital divide for disabled learners (Seale, 2020) and an ongoing lack of expertise amongst teachers (Onesmus, 2020). Teachers seem to be constrained by the everyday operation of their schools; they are struggling to access the knowledge they need to use emerging technologies, and they say they lack the support and time to develop their ideas (Wilson & McKinney, 2012). Even when teachers do get such training and support their confidence remains a challenge, as does finding meaningful ways to apply what they have learned in the classroom context (Cornelius & Shanks, 2017). It seems likely that they struggle to work in new ways because they are restricted by the ‘traditional grammars’ of schooling, those regular structures and rules that have organised the work of instruction, such as single teachers, subjects, classes, lessons, age-grades and testing (Tyack & Tobin, 1994). As a result, schools' use of technologies does not align with what people use at home (such as WhatsApp) and children feel that their out of school digital knowledge is only relevant when doing homework (out of school) (Twining et al, 2017).

Twining et al (2011) suggested over a decade ago that a reason for the failure to effectively adopt information technologies has been an inconsistent vision of what might constitute success, the exclusion of significant voices in decision making and a poor match between needs and provision, as well as a failure to harmonise context, policy, practice, and research. This paper is interested in exploring the research associated with WhatsApp, to see if there are lessons to be learned about the use of and barriers to the use of WhatsApp in educational settings. 

Data has been collected through a systematic search using terms associated with disabilities, impairments and educational needs, alongside terms for educational contexts and the specific term WhatsApp. The search looked for these terms within the title, keyword and abstract. The databases searched were Scopus, Google Scholar and EBSCO (BEI, ERIC, APA Psychinfo, Academic Search Complete, British Education Index, Education Research Complete). 183 papers have been identified through this search process. The papers are now being selected through inclusion and exclusion criteria which focus on whether the paper has something to do with Whatsapp, disability and education, and is in English. Thematic analysis is being undertaken, using an approach drawn from grounded theory (Corbin and Strauss 2008). Through open-coding, the data is being refined to identify concepts which represent aspects of that data, to seek patterns and to enable categorisation, comparison and synthesis. Constant comparison (Mehdi Riazi, 2016) is being used to make connections between the data and the researcher’s conceptualisations of the pragmatic and semantic context, informed by reflection upon his own experiences. Through this process categories are being developed and the researcher is testing the validity of the inferences underpinning them, continually comparing through the use of principles of similarity and contrast.

Findings are not complete at the time of submission. What is very clear already, however is that there are surprisingly few studies that are exploring this issue. It also seems clear that there is very little guidance to inform the practice of class teachers and to influence the decisions of policy makers. As a parent the researcher is experiencing a strange sense of working within the unspoken. As an experienced academic in the field of inclusion, special education, early intervention and participatory research he is used to dealing with many conflicting views and a huge breadth of literature. The lack of consideration of an issue seems of itself to raise fundamental questions about how we draw boundaries around the possible and the practical.

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