Designing for Social Justice: A Decolonial Exploration of How to Develop EdTech for Refugees

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear author(s),

Thank you for the opportunity to read your research paper. You've done an excellent job of using the decolonial lens in your paper. The methods, findings, discussion sections are well written. However, I'd recommend restructuring the introduction section to set the stage better. Rather than directly starting to discuss paradoxes, perhaps provide a more comprehensive background and rationale at the beginning of how this study is unique. 

Additionally, I'd also provide some examples of EdTech that you're referring to within the paper. I'd also recommend discussing the funding and sustainability factor of EdTech in refugee education as appropriate within the paper. 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Many thanks for your feedback and helpful comments. We have responded to your points for improvement. Please see the table below where we detail how we have responded to each point. 

Many thanks again for your review,

Best wishes.

Reviewer 2 Report

Many thanks for the opportunity to review this paper. I enjoyed reading it and learning more of this refugee context in Rwanda and Pakistan and how it interacts with educational technology, drawing particular attention to design and the power asymmetries that potentially exist therein.

I appreciate the candour throughout the piece, that reflexive noting of privilege and drawing reference to the potential tensions in employing largely Western-oriented methodologies and theoretical frameworks into these refugee contexts. I found all of this a convincing presentation of reflexivity and positionality that I would like to see more authors present.

The analytical framework I felt was convincingly presented so well done there. The discussion of refugee education was well done and I thought prevented a good sweep of developments in this space, particularly the discussion of inclusivity, abandonment, bare life, and the camp.

Thank you for the good discussion on the specific contexts of Rwanda and Pakistan (surprisingly, this is often overlooked!).  Out of curiosity, do refugees in these countries have the legal right to obtain a SIM card (which requires in many instances a national ID)? As mobile tech is usually the first and only technology of significant use, this might be worth noting (just in a sentence, I would think). I think part of the issue with edtech for refugees is still the predominance of scaled models (MOOCs) suggesting access to laptops as opposed to smaller, more intimate (and resource intensive) models of refugee education consistent with how they use mobile phones (connections, cultivation of social capital, etc.).

There is a bit of literature to suggest that patterns of educational engagement and technology use shift a bit from the initial education in emergency context to the more protracted displacement context (ie when the ‘camps’ become permanent settlements in many countries) but I don’t think you need go into that (perhaps just a nod to note that exists). I only note this as judging by the sample, the participants were in a much more protracted context than the initial education in emergency phase (and I say that fully aware of the difficulties in pretending that protracted displacement is still not an emergency).

I wonder if there needs to be a bit of discussion on how edtech is being increasingly framed (or conflated?) in these contexts through MOOCs. This sample didn’t exclusively contort to the MOOC discussion but at least in the Rwandan context it did seem to take precedence. The MOOC model, at least judging by my experience in this refugee space, is increasingly critiqued so I wonder if the analytical framework presented in this paper might lend a bit of further critique to the appropriateness of MOOCs for refugee education. I am guessing word count doesn’t allow for this though!

The analysis and discussion were all well presented so well done there, as were the takeaways for edtech designers. I wonder if the right to repair and recycling capacity might be mentioned as well as an issue of justice (considering the environmental injustices quietly being perpetuated by edtech systems).

But again, thank you for the opportunity to review as I thought it made for a good contribution, one that I enjoyed reading. All my best.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Many thanks for your feedback and helpful comments. We have responded to your points for improvement. Please see the table below where we detail how we have responded to each point. 

Many thanks again for your review,

Best wishes.