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

Introduction

The pandemic, with its swift move to remote teaching and learning, positioned digital technologies as a frontline emergency service (Williamson, Eynon, and Potter Citation2020) to continue to deliver education to 99.4% of the world’s student population (UNESCO Citation2020a). That moment of chaotic digitalisation has been addressed as the biggest digital experiment (Culpan Citation2020), with international organisations, edtech businesses and state governments alike rushing to describe the pandemic as both the dawn of the digital era and an unmissable opportunity to rethink education, technology and inclusion globally (UNESCO Citation2020b). However, digital solutions entrenched old inequities, exposing an educational digital divide (UN Citation2020; Reay Citation2020) that created new forms of exclusion and ‘new (digital) vulnerabilities’ (OECD Citation2020). The uneven participation in education due to unequal access to digital technologies hit particularly children and families from ethnic minority backgrounds, Indigenous people and those identified with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND), who struggled to access and use devices (OECD Citation2020; UNESCO Citation2020a). As a result, digital technologies were positioned at the forefront to address these emerging inequalities, renewing discourses around the necessity to enhance children’s and teachers’ digital skills both to thrive in future digital economies and contribute to a more inclusive recovery (UN Citation2020). Moreover, digital technologies as salvific ‘technological fix’ (Perrotta Citation2021, 43) were aligned to policies of ‘inclusion’ of (digitally) vulnerable and disadvantaged subjects reinvigorating a highly profitable ‘political economy of edtech’ (Williamson, Eynon, and Potter Citation2020, 113; Cone et al. Citation2021).

Scholars in the field of education technologies have long advised against technological quick-fixes of existing social, political and economic problems (Ball and Grimaldi Citation2021). Sancho-Gil, Pablo Rivera-Vargas, and Miño-Puigcercós (Citation2020) remark that the digital divide is the by-product of thirty years of relentless neoliberalisation of education according to the market on global, national and subjective scales, with austerity measures, increased privatisation, and the push towards national and international competition increasingly eroding public education funding. These cuts had an inevitable effect on inclusive education programmes, whose objective was to grant equal opportunities to all children regardless their backgrounds (Allan Citation2008; Armstrong, Armstrong, and Spandagou Citation2010) and contributed to the failing of digital inclusion (Selwyn Citation2017), showing how well-resourced individuals ‘are likely to benefit the most from digital education’ (Selwyn et al. Citation2020, 2). These, as the pandemic laid bare, reproduced exclusions along the usual geographical, racialised, ableist and classist subjective lines (Bourassa Citation2021).

‘The resolution of the crisis’ Illich (Citation1973, 10) comments ‘begins with a recognition of the failure’. We place this article squarely in the reflection on the ‘normality’ of educational practices and the ‘complex topological entanglement of the triptych of centre/colony, global/local and physical/digital relationships’ (Grek and Landri Citation2021, 394; Moyo Citation2017). We envisage the chaos of the pandemic as a creative moment to rethink modalities of government through digital and non-digital technologies in convivial ways (Illich Citation1973; Wise and Noble Citation2016; Gilroy Citation2004). We illustrate findings from a one-year qualitative study (2021–2022), the DIGITAL (Diversifying inclusion and Growth: Inspiring Technologies for Accessible Learning) in a time of Coronavirus project, that through analyses of international policy documents, national and local guidelines, pedagogical content, and 27 semi-structured interviews with principals, teachers, teacher assistants, inclusion managers and community leaders explored online and offline pedagogical strategies of enacting inclusion in six countries (Italy, England, Australia, the US, Malaysia, and Chile). By putting to work education assemblage theory (Youdell Citation2015; Thompson, Sellar, and Buchanan Citation2021) we present five context-based and globally interdependent analytical concepts (Deleuze and Guattari Citation2020) to rethink current understandings of inclusion and its relationship with digital technologies, to challenge binary divisions of included/excluded, vulnerable/non-vulnerable subjects, modern/colonial, local/global, and to enable inclusive subjective experiences and becomings (De Lissovoy Citation2010; Santos Citation2018).

In a world of shifting power relations between the Global South and North, this paper contributes to the scholarship of critical studies of inclusion and technologies by providing alternatives to hegemonic uses of digital technologies. It seeks to interrupt the discursive reformulation of exclusions and vulnerabilities in the digital era along racist, ableist and colonial social descriptors and rehabilitate non-scientific knowledges, local histories and expertise for a future in which digital ‘technologies are likely to grow in significance pedagogically, politically and economically’ (Castañeda and Williamson Citation2021, 1).

A predictable crisis: neoliberalism, and the failures of (digital) inclusion

Discourses of inclusion and inclusive recovery need to be located ‘in the broader political economy of the COVID-19 pandemic, its antecedents, and long-term consequences’ (Williamson, Eynon, and Potter Citation2020, 109). Inclusion emerged as a policy strategy in the aftermath of the Second World War, when political and economic equilibria between Global South and North were being adjusted by the end of colonialism and the emergence of globalisation (Armstrong, Armstrong, and Spandagou Citation2010). To deal with increased multicultural diversity (Gilroy Citation2004), discourses around inclusive programmes began to emerge in the Global North, to manage continuing contradictions between education policy and practice ‘in societies that were highly diversified internally and yet globally interconnected’ (Armstrong, Armstrong, and Spandagou Citation2010, 4). Projects of inclusion were meant to challenge exclusions of students along biological and social markers, supporting schools, teachers and communities in transforming school practices in celebration of social diversity. Inclusive education requires that children should be not required to fit into existing (Global North) education structures and dominant norms (Allan Citation2008), promoting accessibility and plurality in pedagogy and curricula (Allan Citation2008; Ladson-Billings Citation2021), and active participation of children and parents in educational matters. Digital technologies entered the discourse of inclusion as access equalisers, assisting and supporting SEND students’ participation in the classroom to improve learning results (Sancho-Gil, Pablo Rivera-Vargas, and Miño-Puigcercós Citation2020).

Projects of (digital) inclusion are closely related to social, economic, political and technical contexts (Castañeda and Williamson Citation2021). In the last thirty years, a neoliberal market-driven agenda, based on competition and performativity, weakened the welfare state, and favoured processes of privatisation, ‘making multinational corporations increasingly prominent in orchestrating the integration of digital technology in education’ (Sancho-Gil, Pablo Rivera-Vargas, and Miño-Puigcercós Citation2020, 62), particularly those based in the Northern part of the world. Its individualising nature relentlessly produced winners and losers; and while inciting winners ‘in a constant process of capital accumulation innovation, consumerism and progress’ (Sancho-Gil, Pablo Rivera-Vargas, and Miño-Puigcercós Citation2020, 63), it continued to try to fix the losers in the hope of making them productive enough for (and included in) the global competition. This is a recursive and discursive mechanism constitutive of the narrative of progress intrinsic of liberal thinking, which relies on a linear idea of history and places betterment in an immaterial future (Santos Citation2018).

Bourassa (Citation2021, 254) encapsulates these entanglements between neoliberalism and inclusion by describing the latter as ‘a number of mechanisms that operate by absorbing, coopting, channelling, extracting and appropriating that which has previously been deemed abject and outside – even antagonistic to – the logic of capital, and enlisting it within the circuits of capitalist accumulation’. During the pandemic, this binary system of thought, foundational of Western thinking, exposed the intersection of inclusion, digital divide and neoliberalism. As UNESCO (Citation2020a, 5) maintains, ‘the Covid-19 pandemic has added new layers of exclusion related to accessibility of distance learning opportunities, which also affect new categories of the population’. These layers dichotomously sifted the productive digitally advanced from the potentially productive digitally vulnerable, simultaneously producing respectively the normal and the Other subjects of the digital era (Bourassa Citation2021; Santos Citation2020). These discursive processes not only exposed the material complicity of programmes of digital inclusion in (re)producing certain subjects as excluded while subsequently aiming to include them, but also opened ontological possibilities for collaborations between the public and private sectors ‘in securing the resources to provide those devices and connectivity’ (OECD Citation2020, 5).

These normative lines emerged through the use of digital technologies to continue school education remotely, with those children from more wealthy backgrounds benefitting the most from the shift, with able children more likely to continue to engage with learning (and to go back to school post-lockdown) (Reay Citation2020; UNESCO Citation2020a), and countries in the Global South or in rural areas more likely to find themselves at a digital disadvantage (OECD Citation2020).

Currently, we live in a world in which organisations and institutions in the Global North decide the terms of inclusion and export a digital thinking that reinforces the Global South technological dependency (Moyo Citation2017). As Santos (Citation2020, 22) puts it ‘[as a result of] having been expelled from the political system, the alternatives will enter each time more frequently in citizens’ lives, and they will do it through the back door of pandemic crises, environmental disasters and financial collapses’. In the next section, we present some analytical tools to make space for such alternatives and to envisage how inclusion can be practised in ‘education in a digital world’ (Macgilchrist, Allert, and Bruch Citation2020, 76) which encloses ‘visions of social futures outside or beyond neoliberalism’ (Slater Citation2015, 2) and its colonial premises (De Lissovoy Citation2010).

Education assemblages, technologies and conviviality for inclusion

The DIGITAL Project mobilises three interconnected bodies of knowledge to analyse the epistemological and ontological dynamics around neoliberalism, inclusion and technologies: Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory and inclusive pedagogies; critical approaches to technologies as tools of government; and conviviality and its implications for decolonial approaches in education. First, we use the notion of assemblage to explore both the global dimension of education policy and politics during the pandemic and local inclusive teaching and learning practices between online and offline spaces. Assemblages are dispositions of things, constituted of lines that connect and productively interplay heterogenous components including political orientations, institutional arrangements, formal and informal knowledges, subjectivities, pedagogies, and affects (Youdell Citation2015). Thompson and Cook (Citation2015, 732) describe them as ‘topological spaces’, ‘surfaces that are spaces in themselves and … their self-organization brings being and knowing, ontology and epistemology, into new kinds of relations’ (Lury et al. 2012, in Thompson and Cook Citation2015, 732).

They can be described as acentric nonhierarchical networks, criss-crossed by three kinds of lines. First, molar lines, which are ‘binary, arborescent and striated’ (Deleuze and Guattari Citation2020, 587) constituted by normative and disciplinary spaces (Allan Citation2008). Second, molecular lines, which enable multiplicities, smooth places and flows (Deleuze and Guattari Citation2020). And third, lines of flight, which open for processes of becoming and deterritorialise assemblages to spaces of multiplicity that challenge the premises of the inclusive project in its dualistic inclusion/exclusion dimension (Bourassa Citation2021). These three kinds of lines make visible, select, order and unstably connect the elements of the assemblage, in relations that Deleuze and Guattari (Citation2020, 2) describe as ‘machinic’, that is ‘the idea that assemblages have both structure and random connectedness’ (Thompson and Cook Citation2015, 733). Here planes of consistency define the fleeting stability of certain connections, they are ‘a grid’ (Deleuze and Guattari Citation2020, 7) that allows certain forms of experiences, enabled and disenabled at the same time ‘by lines of flights or deterritorializations according to which they change in nature and connect with other multiplicities’ (Deleuze and Guattari Citation2020, 7).

Hence the assemblage always shifts between territorialisations, deterritorialisations and reterritorialisations, ‘always in the process of coming together … just as it is always also potentially pulling apart’ (McCann and Ward 2012, in Savage Citation2020, 326).

However, assemblages always find new territorialisations, such as the digital divide. To avoid discursive reproduction of inequities, we use Deleuze’s idea of ‘concept’ to treat reterritorialisations not as returns to unequal territories, but rather as ‘differential relations internal to deterritorialization itself’ (Deleuze and Guattari Citation2020, 592). Deleuze’s concepts are active connectors, creating an order (Colebrooke Citation2002) that eschews normalising and prescriptive uses of technologies, are ‘vectors’, ‘acts immersed in a changing state of things’ (Massumi Citation2020, xi), ‘not amenable to dictionary style definitions, for their power lies in being open and expansive’ (Colebrooke Citation2002, 17). Therefore first, by making order, concepts can become tools to address the political, economic, social, and historical ‘messiness’ of technology and education (Selwyn Citation2017), thus connecting local and contingent experiences with global dynamics (Thompson, Sellar, and Buchanan Citation2021). Second, they can move beyond the thinking of difference typical of the Western thought that constructs the Other through dichotomies that repress difference (De Lissovoy Citation2010; Mignolo Citation2011; Peruzzo Citation2021). Deleuze’s concepts actively create difference as politics based on an acceptance of multiplicity, they ‘ride difference’ (Massumi Citation2020, xi) rather than logics of binarism. Third, they enable new forms of experience that rely on points of rupture rather than striated and hierarchical knowledges described by molar lines (Allan Citation2008).

However, to expand subjective experiences and allow for alternative instances of inclusion in increasingly globally interconnected education systems, technologies need to be rethought so to ‘affirm radical and autonomous political responses of communities regularly targeted by neoliberal crises’ (Slater Citation2015, 2). The notion of ‘digital technologies’ here is highly problematic, first because it places immediately certain social groups in a condition of disadvantage (Selwyn Citation2017; Santos Citation2020); second because they are usually framed instrumentally by government and corporate thinking (Williamson, Eynon, and Potter Citation2020); third they are underpinned by the Eurocentric project of Modernity that ‘systematically disregards thousands of years’ history of humanity, civilisation and the continuous development of systematic techniques for making and doing things’ (Sancho-Gil, Pablo Rivera-Vargas, and Miño-Puigcercós Citation2020, 62), in particular forms of non-scientific knowledges and education practices in the Global South (Santos Citation2018).

We consider technologies both in their digital and non-digital conformation, and understand them not ‘in their functional value, (“what works”)’ (Perrotta Citation2021, 44), rather as material conformations of power that allow for certain dispositions of things, affects, thoughts, and conducts of subjects within education assemblages. We re-imagine them ‘along collectively-organised – rather than self-regulated – lines’ (Selwyn and Jandric Citation2020, 1004) as forms of government of communities, individuals and selves (Foucault Citation1982). We expand their definition to comprise technical assemblages of means, techniques and institutions (Rose Citation1999), following Illich (Citation1973, 34) in maintaining how ‘school curricula or marriage laws are no less purposely shaped social devices than road networks’. Thus, technologies are dispositions for government within the education assemblage that we mobilise to foster conviviality (Selwyn et al. Citation2020; Macgilchrist, Allert, and Bruch Citation2020). Illich (Citation1973, 24) defined conviviality as ‘autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and … their environment’, and he highlighted the ‘intrinsic ethical value’ of ‘individual freedom realized in personal interdependence’, in contrast with situations in which individuals are conditioned by demands and requirements of others. Conviviality is concerned with the ‘nature of the interaction itself, rather than ‘more structurally-oriented explanation of social order”’ (Wise and Noble Citation2016, 424), a philosophy of living together that challenges the individualism and performativity of the neoliberal reason with its fast-paced and extractivist objectives. Here technologies in their digital and non-digital forms are means for convivial government, not super-imposed nor designed with profitability in mind (Illich Citation1973), rather with a view to a more equitable, participatory, and democratic society oriented to degrowth (Vetter Citation2018). Their ontological dimension enables a decentring of the digital subject by interrupting striated, racialised, ableist Eurocentric molar lines of progress that incite ‘the survival of the fittest’ (Boisvert Citation2010, 60) and the production of vulnerable subjectivities. In a present in which neo-colonial discourses have seen the Global South being re-produced as non-digital, late-comer (De Lissovoy Citation2010), rural and ‘underdeveloped’ (Moyo Citation2017), convivial government through technologies allow to capture the lines of flight materialised by fleeting feelings of togetherness and solidarity emerged during the pandemic. Their re-territorialisation enables new concepts to capture alternative modalities of doing inclusive education as ‘practices of inhabiting diversity’ (Wise and Noble Citation2016, 425), to explore ‘co-habitation and interaction’, and mix Western and Non-western components to problematise ‘ever-expanding imperial universals’ (Gilroy Citation2004, xi-ii). In the next section, we introduce the methods used to single out certain ‘education alternatives’ in the six countries we explored, which enabled us to identify five concepts that qualify a convivial use of technologies towards inclusive education assemblages.

The research project

The study deployed three sets of analytical methods at different scales (global, national and local) across the six countries. We first analysed the dominant discourses around digital solutions for an inclusive recovery and to tackle the digital divide, through policy briefings and reports produced by influential international organisations (including OCED, UNESCO, and UNICEF). Whilst this is a constitutive part of the project, in this article for reasons of space we focus on the second part of the analysis, on the practices that challenged dominant discourses around digital technologies and inclusion. To single out such practices, we contacted gatekeepers working in schools and universities, and experts collaborating with international organisations, asking for inside-knowledge in identifying instances which exhibited inclusive practices during the pandemic mobilising pedagogies that used both digital and non-digital technologies. With their insights, we became in contact with six schools and organisations, one for each country, including a small primary school in Tasmania, a small comprehensive academy in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, an organisation supporting and collaborating with public schools in the South of Italy, an arts-based primary school in the Centre of Chile; a state primary school in a remote area in the north of England, and a state school in Massachusetts. Upon approval of the research project by the Humanities and Social Sciences Ethical Review Committee at the University of Birmingham, we contacted school principals, teachers, and community leaders and conducted 27 semi-structured online interviews with teachers, teacher assistants, inclusion managers, parents and community leaders and collected material from their pedagogic practices during the pandemic.

We structured interview questions so to enable reflections on situations and events in which the interviewees intersected digital and non-digital technologies in ways that reached all children. We then deployed situational analysis (Clarke, Friese, and Washburn Citation2015) as an operational technique to analyse the connections between technologies, pedagogic material, interviewees’ accounts, and school policies. We used paper and pen as non-digital technologies to draw maps and visualise ‘planes of consistency’ as surfaces that order the elements and their overlapping and continuously deforming connections. In these maps, we eschewed ‘molar lines’, the ones that reproduce a disciplinary and exclusionary normality, and followed ‘molecular lines’, exploring where education communities attempted to ‘organise schools, classrooms and pedagogies not predicted on prior assessment of “abilities”’ (Youdell Citation2015, 112) or backgrounds in their deployment of technologies, and lines of flights, that open for becomings and deterritorialisations. Through Scrivener, a qualitative data analysis software, we systematised the analysis by thematically grouping the planes of consistency, which enabled the concepts to emerge and account for the multiplicities enabled by the assemblage (Thompson, Sellar, and Buchanan Citation2021).

The excerpts we present in the article have been chosen among others as emblematic of such planes and concepts, in that they capture spaces of structure and lines of flight, making visible the connections emerging from the data. They give account to the ‘alternatives’ to molar and disciplinary solutions that during the pandemic reproduced new forms of digital vulnerabilities and exclusions, operating ‘under the mainstream radar’ (Macgilchrist, Allert, and Bruch Citation2020, 86), ordinary but ‘topical and illustrative’ (Ball and Grimaldi Citation2021, 1) examples of how ‘inclusion worked to limit and effectively reconstitute politics’ (Gilroy Citation2004, 8). These concepts are qualifiers of inclusive education assemblages, they open connections and allow for a convivial government through the encounter of digital and non-digital technologies and subjective multiplicities following lines of flights and becomings. We present these in the next section.

Convivial technologies for education assemblages: fives concepts for inclusive education

In this section, we present the five concepts emerging from data analysis. Each of these concepts is described by two planes of consistency that produce certain orientations for thinking and practising inclusive education and enabled multiple subjective possibilities through the rhizomatic disposition of elements within education assemblages in the six instances.

Conclusions

The COVID-19 pandemic and the push to remote digital learning exposed the workings of digital neoliberalism in producing, through the digital divide, new global dependences between Global South and North and new forms of (digital) vulnerabilities. State governments, international organisations, and edu-business alike mobilised discourses around digital technologies as the solution to include those children that the digital divide had reproduced as in need. In this way, not only new exclusions were produced along the usual social markers of ability, race, and class, but also a Global North-centred definitions of (digital) inclusive education were reproposed, while opening a florid market for edtech.

In this article, we sought to demystify the salvific role of digital technologies and problematise Global North definitions of (digital) inclusive education by presenting findings from the DIGITAL in a time of Coronavirus project. We defined technologies as means of government, encompassing not only their digital and non-digital dimensions but also the education assemblages that they enable. We presented five concepts that describe technologies and their uses as convivial, to rewrite the notion of inclusion and enable alternative knowledges, pedagogies, subjectivities, and solutions to become visible and therefore enactable. These five concepts (accessibility, affectivity, presentness, interdependency and relatedness), and related planes of consistency as grids that enabled certain dispositions and connections to be made possible and visible, capture a convivial use of technologies for inclusion within local education assemblages which are increasingly shaped globally (De Lissovoy Citation2010). They emerge from the analysis of six instances in Italy, Chile, England, Malaysia, the US and Australia and are presented as qualifiers of connections across inclusive education assemblages, as heuristics that enable a rethinking of uses of technologies in ways that recognise diversity among learners, following molecular lines that connect digital and non-digital pedagogies, and root learning in local communities, resources and cultures (Armstrong, Armstrong, and Spandagou Citation2010). Lastly, these concepts allow to follow lines of flights that assembled around alternative manifestations of ‘remotedness’; they move beyond Eurocentric, racialised and ableist understandings of experience and technologies and expand the epistemological premises on which subjectivities can become included.

Convivial uses of technologies open inclusive education to contamination of multiple systems of thought and epistemologies that do not rely on binary subjective formations. They provoke new lines of flight for interdependence, affectivity and decolonialised connectedness on a local and global level which can ‘help shape how digital education unfolds in more diverse and socially-aware ways’ (Selwyn and Jandric Citation2020, 1001). By making visible alternatives to exclusively digital solutions, we hope that these concepts can offer context-based policy tools for (political) intervention (Allan Citation2008) in the field of inclusive education, to rethink the entanglement of digital technologies, vulnerabilities and exclusion, and challenge narrow and Eurocentric constructions of the digital divide in ways that respect and enhance local expertise and culture.