The Education RESET Project: Renewal and Technologies for Inclusive Educational Futures

The Education RESET Project is a two-year project that investigates the reproduction of education digital and social inequalities during the pandemic, and seeks to reset education by providing instances of inclusive and culturally relevant practices in three case-study primary schools in England, Italy and Malaysia. 

The swift move to remote teaching and learning, which relied heavily on digital technologies to continue to perform regular (normal) schooling generated new-old forms of vulnerability and exclusion. Encapsulated by the concept of digital divide, these new forms of (digital) inequities were reproduced along the usual identity markers of ability, class, gender, and geographical positions. 

The Education RESET project builds on Phase 1 DIGITAL in a time of Coronavirus project, which analysed how at the onset of the pandemic socio-economic, political and historical conditions reproduced new forms of inequalities through the digital divide and identified instances of creativity and inclusion through remote and hybrid teaching and learning. The RESET project further develops this preliminary analysis along three lines: 

• First, it will deploy Cultural Political Economy (CPE) as an analytical policy approach to analyse the intersection of contextual, historical, political and economic dynamics that led certain digital strategies to be adopted in each selected country with processes of exclusion of certain educational subjects. 
• Second, informed by post-structural tools, in particular assemblage theory, and de-ableist and culturally sustainable pedagogies, the project will gather evidence from selected case-studies through focus groups with teachers to explore their experiences of digital pedagogies during the series of lockdowns, and identify the modalities that interrupt the reproduction of exclusion in the wake of the pandemic. 
• Lastly, it will undertake workshops with children to explore their experiences and desires in relation to technologies and foster children’s development of digital skills. 

The study will produce internationally relevant outcomes to inform teachers’ ways of working with digital technologies that are inclusive and decolonialised; contribute to countries’ policy agenda drawing upon children’s future digital expectations and educational desires; and revise definitions of educational ‘inclusion’ informed by the advent of digital and non-digital technologies that are context-relevant and pedagogy-appropriate.

• Principal Investigator: Professor Julie Allan 
• Research Lead: Dr Francesca Peruzzo