Rethinking inclusive (digital) education: lessons from the pandemic to reconceptualise inclusion through convivial technologies

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic and the move to remote education exposed old and new inequities, yet it also represented anopportunity to rethink inclusive education. This paper presents findings from a one-year project DIGITAL in a time of Coronavirus anddraws upon policy analysis and interviews with teachers, principals, and community leaders from six countries in the Global North andSouth (Italy, England, Malaysia, Australia, United States and Chile). By mobilising education assemblage theory to challenge binarydivisions (included/excluded, modern/colonial, local/global), it presents five concepts to rethink inclusion and its relationship withtechnologies. It illustrates how during the pandemic alternative entanglements of digital and non-digital technologies challengednarrow and Eurocentric constructions of the digital divide enabling inclusive subjective experiences. Drawing upon local possibilitiesand histories, re-habilitating non-scientific knowledges, especially in view of future experiences of blended education, the paper seeksto provide policy tools to rethink current understandings of inclusive education.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• neoliberalism
• assemblage theory
• decolonial and inclusive education
• technologies

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank all the research participants for being beacons of hope and change in education, and the peer-reviewers for such thoughtful, critical and constructive comments on the first draft of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the YTL Foundation.