Inclusive Digital Education: Contexts, Practices and Perspectives

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization has referred to inclusive education as ‘a dynamic approach of responding positively to pupil diversity and of seeing individual differences not as problems, but as opportunities for enriching learning’ (UNESCO, Citation2005, p. 12). More recently, UNESCO (Citation2017, p. 7) referred to it as a ‘process of strengthening the capacity of the education system to reach out to all learners’. Since the Salamanca Declaration, education systems have been contending with how to put these principles in to practice, given the complex interplay between policy, pedagogy, curriculum, assessment and resourcing, as well as teacher knowledge, skills and understanding around effective inclusive practice (Slee & Tait, Citation2022). One perennial element in the mix has been the potential for educational technology to make a contribution. Just as with the wider field (Mishra et al., Citation2009), the question has been how to ensure that the promised potential of technology can be brought to actual fruition in terms of supporting educational inclusion. We focused in the call for this special issue on the term ‘digital inclusion’, partly because this albeit still evolving phrasing tends to be associated with a wider definition which as well as considering educational technology in the classroom also addresses wider policy issues such as the provision of infrastructure, training and the consideration of how structural societal issues might impact on differential access to technology. So we agree with Hamburg and Lütgen (Citation2019) who argued that “The term digital inclusion is still quite new and addresses issues of opportunity, access, knowledge, and skills at the level of digitalization policy … (it is) a complex social problem that transcends several policy domains, each with its own—often conflicting—views and agenda in relation to felt responsibility, need and kind of action”.