Leveraging EdTech in Creating Refugee-Inclusive Classrooms in Canada

Abstract

As Canada experiences a growing number of newcomer students with refugee backgrounds, K-12 educators face challenges to meet students’ unique academic, linguistic, and psychosocial needs. This paper examines the role of educational technology (EdTech) to bridge the resource and training gap by enhancing teacher preparedness through an accessible, inclusive, and trauma-informed digital resource. This study presents a qualitative case study methodology to analyze the interactive online manual, Supporting Teachers to Address the Mental Health of Students from War Zones. The research utilizes three data sources: feedback from 110 educators through a questionnaire, observational data from 69 students from two separate pre-service teacher cohorts, and an expert evaluation report conducted by university curriculum specialists. Findings suggest that successful EdTech for refugee-background student initiatives must be trauma-informed, strength-based, culturally responsive, and designed with usability and accessibility in mind. Furthermore, collaboration between K-12 educators, researchers, and developers is vital to ensure that there is alignment of pedagogy and technology.

1. Introduction

Imagine stepping into a K-12 classroom where a quarter of the students have fled conflict, crossed borders, and are navigating an entirely new world, trying to acclimatize to a new language, culture, and education system. Now, imagine being the teacher responsible for guiding them, without the necessary tools or resources to meet their unique needs. This is the reality for many public-school teachers in Canada today. As the number of students with refugee backgrounds continues to grow, there is an urgent need for accessible, inclusive, and trauma-informed resources (Dryden-Peterson, 2022; Noori, 2025; Stewart, 2011). However, many educators report feeling unprepared and under-resourced to support students with experiences of forced displacement (CBC News, 2018; Noori, 2025). This paper explores how education technology (EdTech) may offer a promising avenue to bridge this gap and better prepare Canadian educators for this new reality.

Designing materials for Canadian K-12 teachers working with students of refugee backgrounds necessitates a deep and nuanced understanding of the unique challenges faced by both teachers and students, particularly in the post-COVID school context. This paper begins by summarizing key considerations for the development of EdTech solutions, focusing on the integration of teachers and refugee-background students’ experiences, and the tools available to enhance pedagogical practices and students’ academic outcomes. The central focus of this paper is the case study of Supporting Teachers to Address the Mental Health of Students from War Zones, an online manual created to assist teachers in supporting refugee-background students’ integration and well-being (Noori, 2023).

We outline our process for engaging in reflexive thematic analysis to create and improve EdTech resources for pre-service and in-service teacher training, noting that both authors’ positionalities are shaped by personal experiences with forced migration, which underscores the importance of reflexivity to critically examine how our lived histories inform our interpretations and analytical lens. The study’s methodology involves a systematic analysis of users’ feedback collected through quality control surveys, interaction observations from two pre-service teacher cohorts, and an expert evaluation report from our university’s curriculum specialists. Through this engagement, we hope to contribute to the broader discourse on EdTech’s role in fostering inclusive and culturally responsive teaching practices in teacher training programs.

Refugee students often encounter significant barriers to integration within the Canadian education system (Ferede, 2012; Noori, 2020, in press). Schutte and Milley (2023) emphasize that refugee-background students have distinct needs and require tailored educational approaches, including the necessity for inclusive practices that consider their precarious relationships with public institutions. The integration of refugee students must be a collective effort from school administrators, support staff, and peers, who all collaboratively create and foster an inclusive school environment (Guo et al., 2019).

Information and communication technologies are employed by refugees to help access resettlement services (Hussain & Brown, 2024) and have been noted to positively reinforce refugee agency (Díaz Andrade & Doolin, 2016, 2019). However, these technologies are mostly known to surveil and control the movement of people seeking asylum (Iazzolino, 2021; Madon & Schoemaker, 2021). In the context of providing access to learning opportunities, Alam and Imran (2015) show that digital divide grows for refugees due to physical access to and use of digital technology, but when this gap is bridged, some refugees have been able to receive medical and teacher training capabilities through specialized Canadian university programs for students in war zones or camps (Bhabha et al., 2020; Qayumi et al., 2024). Thus, research into refugees and EdTech has tended to focus on K-12 students in temporary transitory states (Ashlee et al., 2020) and not in resettlement states like Canada.

The focus of our research and this paper is the kind of EdTech that needs to be developed for classroom teachers in host countries where students who have experienced forced displacement are integrated into public schools. Ratković et al. (2022) argue that education can serve as a form of healing for refugee children, suggesting that EdTech tools should be designed to support emotional well-being alongside academic learning. This aligns with Stewart et al. (2019) and Noori’s (2025) findings that highlight teachers feeling ill prepared to meet the complex needs of refugee-background students, emphasizing the dire demands for professional development and resources. There is growing reflection in the field for designing and implementing social justice in digital technology broadly (Pang et al., 2024; Tobin & Hieker, 2021) and EdTech specifically (Macgilchrist, 2021). There is some literature that explores strategies for decolonizing EdTech generally in contexts of forced displacement (Al Habsi & Rude, 2021; Barnes et al., 2024; Tauson & Stannard, 2018). There remains a paucity in studies of teacher training programs working with refugee-background students through EdTech which also de-centres Western hegemonic lenses of refugee circumstances (Barnes et al., 2024; Crompton et al., 2021).

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated existing challenges facing refugees’ access to quality schooling, leading to increased reliance on digital learning tools. The shift to online education revealed significant disparities in getting the necessary technology and know-how for refugee students. For public health reasons, the COVID-19 pandemic forced Canadian lawmakers to move almost all classroom activities online, demonstrating that EdTech solutions are adaptable and can support both in-person and remote learning environments. Research on teachers’ wellbeing since the pandemic shows they are struggling with overwhelm and feelings of inadequacy when it comes to meeting students’ needs overall, with special needs students at particular risk (Sokal et al., 2025). Thus, the development of training programs for educators on the effective use of digital tools is essential to ensure that they are equipped to meet the diverse needs of their students, without feeling overburdened (Levi, 2019).

By focusing on inclusive practices leveraging technology to enhance teachers’ understanding of refugee-background students’ life stories, and providing adequate training to educators (Michalovich, 2024), it is possible to create effective educational tools that support K-12 teachers who are working to enhance the learning experiences of refugee-background students in Canada. Therefore, the key research question of this paper is, “What design considerations should inform the development of educational technologies intended for use by Canadian teachers working with refugee-background students?” The focus here is the case study of an online manual, Supporting Teachers to Address the Mental Health, which was co-created by educators, learning technologists, and learning designers invested in providing teachers in British Columbia, Canada, with the content, resources, and pedagogical tools needed to better support refugee-background students. Due to the overall lack of resources available to teachers (Noori, 2025, in press), this collaboration identified an immediate need for strength-based, trauma-informed, culturally relevant materials that also need to be concise, multimodal, user-friendly, and accessible to teachers.

2. Conceptual Framework for Design

Integrating a culturally informed framework into our online manual provided a starting point to interweave decolonial practices that recognize the diverse experiences of newcomer refugee communities, including their contexts of displacement and their varied expressions of resilience. A decolonial approach to EdTech acknowledges that technology is not neutral and may reproduce “intersectional injustice and digital oppression” (Barnes et al., 2024, p. 24). Our aim was to promote a more equitable distribution of technological benefits by challenging colonial narratives, decentering Western voices, histories, and knowledge systems, and creating space to highlight various refugee community practices that sustain people through resettlement. Although some commonalities serve as a thread between the experiences of refugees, our goal was to acknowledge the plurality and complex processes that account for variation and cannot be generally applied (Alim et al., 2020).

We designed sections of the EdTech manual that invite learners to engage with knowledge beyond their current understandings. This new learning is directed toward supporting the well-being of refugee newcomer children, their families, and their communities, with an emphasis on respect, care, and responsibility. To facilitate meaning making and problem solving embedded in a culturally informed framework we integrated mostly Canadian resources from artists, journalists, and writers from a variety of refugee backgrounds. We not only considered cultural variance but rather the complex and intersectional cauldron of identities that emerge through the refugee experience including experiences of war, forced displacement, gender, class, race, socio-economic status, and sexual identity.

We also used a strength-based approach by sharing refugee stories that not only acknowledge the challenges of war-related trauma but also emphasize the successes and resilience within the refugee experience, thereby countering deficit-based assumptions and practices. As Hughes (2014) argues, positioning the refugee experience as vulnerable does not adequately acknowledge or attend to the resourcefulness and success required to address complex socio-political contexts nor the skills required and developed to process and negotiate the systemic abuses they experience. If educators do not adopt strength-based strategies, they risk disempowering and alienating students and families who seek support. The manual we created works to leverage what White (2004) refers to as “double listening”—the process of attending to traumatic experiences, vulnerability, and injustice, and to those stories that live behind accounts of trauma and bring forward forgotten stories of resistance and survival, and resilience and coping (Wade, 1997; White, 2004). When educators incorporate “double listening” they are less likely to retraumatize refugee students and their families and less likely to trap them in a position of victimhood. A strength-based approach supports us to share with teachers the knowledge to navigate community and ministry resources and services, and understand refugee and newcomer students from a variety of backgrounds in ways that are not reductive and do not, “limit how we understand and document human potential and its realizations” (de Royston et al., 2020, p. xviii).

Lastly, we integrated Social Emotional Learning (SEL) theory as a way to define trauma as a healable wound (Caruth, 1996), and to describe traumatic triggers and how to respond to them, using research-based activities to support the healing process. Research suggests that SEL as a school-based intervention is an effective way to support newcomers to overcome disruption to family routines or discrimination and can improve students’ mental health, academic success, and social inclusion (Block et al., 2014; Jones et al., 2021). Indeed, Sliwka and Ye (2015) found that SEL has a direct impact on academic success because cognitive, meta-cognitive, and social and emotional processes are interactive, and contribute both to motivation and to learning. To leverage this concept in our manual, we discussed teachers’ common concerns and questions and provided relevant support, resources, and strategies for physical, psychological, social, familial, and communal dimensions of students’ lives (see Figure 1. screen capture of all the manual’s chapter titles, shows the breadth of content available to educators). Our manual emphasizes the importance of acknowledging, listening, and integrating students’ lived experiences into the learning context to improve their overall well-being and academic success (OECD, 2020). From modelling kindness, empathy, and new customs or daily school routines, to introducing students to peers and community-based activities, our manual seeks to provide tangible and realistic solutions that do not lead to teachers feeling overwhelmed. While acknowledging that most BC teachers have not been adequately prepared to teach refugee students (Noori, 2025), we invited teachers to scaffold using the teaching strategies and resources provided through the EdTech resource so that their classrooms are more equitable and welcoming, and support students to reach their potential (Cerna, 2019). To aim to address teachers’ needs, we infused a tri-framework made up of culturally informed theory, a strength-based approach, and SEL.

3. Theories Informing EdTech Design

In developing the online manual, we drew inspiration from Costanza-Chock’s Design Justice Principles (Costanza-Chock, 2018, 2020). Design Justice Principles aims to create a more equitable distribution of the benefits of technology design, to generate meaningful and fair participation in design processes and decisions, and to recognize design practices, traditions, and knowledges that are community-specific. And while we acknowledge the tremendous steps taken in the reiteration of the Universal Design for Learning Principles (UDL), to transform learning environments into spaces that everyone, regardless of health, neurodiversity, and dis/ability can actively engage with, and to address biases rooted in systems of oppression (CAST, 2024), we must also recognize that any single-axis framework risks erasure of communities who are historically and intersectionally marginalized by interlocking systems of oppression that are not experienced in isolation. In this way, we apply Design Justice Principles as a tool of liberation to challenge the reproduction of existing inequalities and the uneven distribution of risks and harms, which designers often unintentionally overlook and reproduce (Wachter-Boettcher, 2017). As Costanza-Chock (2018, 2020) claims, technology design that is not informed by intersectional understanding, by default, prioritizes designs for dominant social groups, and is thus ill-equipped to address the plethora of ‘design demands’ that benefit people and communities “who are usually invisibilized in the world of technology” (p. 536).

In practice and process, design justice principles are based on ten underpinnings that centre people and communities historically marginalized and prioritize collaborative and creative practices to address intersecting design challenges. The ten principles work to: heal, sustain, empower, and liberate communities from oppressive systems; centre the voices of people who are impacted by the design outcome; prioritize the community impact over the intentions of the design/designer; view change emergent from an accessible, accountable, and collaborative process; envisage the designer not as an expert but as a facilitator; acknowledge everyone as an expert of their own lived experience who bring “unique and brilliant” contributions to the design process; share design tools and knowledge with community; work towards community-led, controlled, and sustainable outcomes, and non-exploitative solutions that reignite our relationship to each other and to the earth; look for what works at the community-level before pursuing new design solutions; and “honor and uplift traditional, indigenous, and local knowledge and practices” (Costanza-Chock, 2018, p. 530).

Design Justice Principles guide our team to develop a system to recognize and address in our designs that each teacher brings unique and intersecting identities, wisdoms, teaching background, and lived experiences into their classroom and that these identities and experiences influence their understanding, engagement, and reactions to new information. Recognizing intersectionality in design also extends to—among additional intersecting inequalities—acknowledging neurodiversity, experiences of trauma, and sensory variations that might impact how teachers process information (Costanza-Chock, 2020). For instance, some teachers have sensory differences that affect how they process and interpret information. Some teachers are blind or deaf, cannot smell or have heightened senses. Some teachers come from refugee backgrounds or have familial connections to war, refugee experiences, or colonial and intergenerational trauma (Noori, 2025). Since we cannot predict every need of every teacher who might use the resource, we invited teachers to complete a survey or communicate with us directly, which allowed us to meaningfully respond to their individual needs as they arose and to adjust the online manual accordingly and iteratively throughout the design process.

4. The Rise 360 Platform

Articulate Rise 360 was instrumental in supporting our objective to develop an online manual grounded in the Design Justice Principles. The platform provided a strong foundation for reducing common barriers to user learning by offering features such as heading blocks and content labels, which enabled consistent organization and improved functionality, predictability, and navigation throughout the course. Aligning with Ortiz’s (2024) findings, most participating teachers reported that Rise 360’s design facilitated a well-structured and streamlined learning environment that supported engagement and increased both the motivation and ability to complete lessons and tasks. A key objective of our team was to promote users’ sustained attention and meaningful interaction with the content. To mitigate aspects of the digital access divide within our sphere of influence, we ensured that the manual was fully accessible across multiple devices—including laptops, tablets, and smartphones—and adaptable to both portrait and landscape modes without compromising the integrity of the content or design. Figure 2 provides a visual of how the layout of the pages look on Rise360.

The Articulate Rise 360 platform (2025) offers design capabilities that support the effective management of cognitive load through the strategic use of white space and clearly labelled, descriptive links. Additionally, Rise 360 is compatible with a range of screen readers and supports multilingual content translation, enhancing accessibility for diverse user groups. For multimedia content, the platform allows for the integration of text-based descriptions within content blocks and facilitates the inclusion of audio descriptions with minimal constraints. These features enabled us to offer meaningful text-based alternatives and descriptive content, ensuring that all users could access and engage with the manual’s information, resources, and activities (Articulate, 2025).

To further support accessibility, we employed plain language, selected accessible fonts and font sizes, and adjusted image opacity or contrast levels to ensure sufficient differentiation between text and background elements for users with visual impairments. As noted by Benson et al. (2019), Articulate Rise 360 supports accessible educational design through features that minimize text density and prioritize interactive learning. These include knowledge-check activities, engaging user interactions, and the flexibility to incorporate a variety of media formats.

5. Methodology

As a qualitative research method, our case study research involves in-depth investigation of a single case within the educational system using a triangulation approach. For this study, we explore the content and design consideration for an EdTech tool meant to provide a multitude of refugee experiences, knowledge, and teaching resources and tools for public school teachers in BC. The aim of this case study is to generate a nuanced understanding of how EdTech design and development can meet the needs of educators working with refugee-background students. The study involves a systematic analysis of users’ feedback collected through quality control surveys, interaction observations from two pre-service teacher cohorts, and an expert evaluation report from university’s curriculum specialists.

5.1. Data Collection

The sources of data for this study are the responses in the Qualtrics questionnaire provided at the end of the manual (see Supplementary Materials), the observed usage and feedback from two groups of students, and an expert evaluation report. There are currently 500 users of the manual and 110 provided feedback in the Qualtrics survey. The Qualtrics survey asked seven key questions related to the usefulness and quality of the EdTech. The developers created the survey for simple feedback and quality control purposes, not specifically for this research study. The second set of data comes from Sofia Noori’s observation and recording of two separate pre-service secondary teachers’ cohort’s immediate responses to the manual. The third set of reactions to the manual comes from the university’s curriculum specialist, who provided expert evaluation of the online manual, Supporting Teachers to Address the Mental Health. Triangulating survey data with user observations and expert responses provides key directives for this study and the EdTech’s improvement.

5.2. Research Instruments

A Qualtrics survey was embedded within the Canvas course shell on the same page as the Rise 360 manual, under the title Feedback Survey, to maximize accessibility. The survey comprised eight groups of questions designed to elicit user perceptions of the manual. The initial set employed a five-point Likert scale (ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree) to measure perceptions of usefulness, clarity of information, user-friendliness, quality, knowledge acquisition, and willingness to recommend the resource. Subsequent groups of questions solicited users’ views on the most useful chapter, preferred modalities (e.g., text, audiovisuals, interactive activities), and comparisons with other educational technologies. Additional questions addressed the perceived comprehensiveness of the content, the target audiences for whom the manual would be recommended, suggestions for improvement (open-ended), and the source through which users first became aware of the resource. The survey was developed by Jamilee Baroud’s team for the purpose of quality assurance and iterative refinement of the manual.

The second data source consisted of Noori’s observations and recordings of two cohorts of pre-service secondary teachers enrolled in a special topics course on refugee education. In the first cohort, who had just completed their program, students voluntarily provided verbal feedback during the final sessions of the course. Noori documented these responses for the purpose of refining the newly developed manual. Using Braun and Clarke’s (2020) six-phase model as guidance on reflexive thematic analysis to examine the pre-service secondary teachers’ verbal feedback. The analysis began with deep familiarization through multiple active listening and reviewing recorded notes, noting emerging ideas. Open coding was used to capture meaning as conveyed by the participants (Braun & Clarke, 2020), to capture immediate themes such as ‘grammar’, ‘activities’, and ‘diversity’. This method relies on the researcher’s critical and reflective engagement with both the data and the analytic process (Braun & Clarke, 2020).

In the following year, a second cohort engaged with the manual as their primary course resource. Noori systematically recorded students’ comments at the conclusion of each week. The codes from the previous year (i.e., ‘grammar’, ‘activities,’ and ‘diversity’) were used. However, specification of the location of change and the nature of the suggested updates were also clarified. This refined the themes to ‘activities: manual’s content assessment’; ‘activities: in-person classroom’; ‘diversity of location: refugee-producing countries’; ‘diversity resettlement communities: organizations supporting refugees’. Increased reflections made the analysis richer as Noori increased sensitivity to ‘resiliency’ language used throughout the manual.

The third data source consisted of an expert evaluation conducted by the university’s curriculum specialists (Learning Designers). Using their own evaluation instruments and guidelines, they assessed the resource primarily for accessibility and usability, not for subject-matter content. Their evaluation emphasized the extent to which UDL principles and the POUR framework were evident in the manual. The reflexive thematic analysis led to codes on the quality of textual, audiovisual, and interactive components developed in Rise 360.

5.3. Positionality

The authors of this study bring both lived experience and professional expertise to the development of this EdTech initiative. Noori, who experienced forced displacement and resettled in Canada as a young child, is a licensed teacher and a faculty member training pre-service teachers. Recognizing the need for resources during her tenure at Canada’s largest school board, she authored a manual to support teachers working with refugee-background students. Baroud’s father fled war in Lebanon and sought refuge in Canada. She works as a Curriculum and Evaluation consultant in the same faculty, and collaborated with Noori to transform Supporting Teachers to Address the Mental Health into an interactive, online resource. Baroud’s team created the online manual using the platform Rise 360.

Qualitative methodologist Wanda Pillow suggests that “researchers explore how it is we go about talking about our positions, that is how we practice reflexivity, and how these practices impact, open up, or limit the possibilities for critical representations” (2003, p. 177). We were critically conscious of how our self-location (across, for example, gender, race, age, class, sexuality, ethnicity, and nationality), position, and interests influence all stages of our writing, EdTech design, and research process. As demonstrated by our conceptual and theoretical considerations outlined above, our reflexivity “becomes a continuing mode of self-analysis and political awareness” (Callaway, 1992, p. 33). The result of all of this reflexivity is to produce research that is deeply critical in interpretations and the knowledge we produce through innovative EdTech creation and research of it. Ultimately, our goal is to produce better, less distorted research accounts (Hertz, 1997; Pillow, 2003).

For us, our reflexivity on our positionality is an ongoing process of self-awareness during the research process, which aids in making visible the practice and construction of knowledge through design, research, and writing to produce more accurate analyses of our work. As Davies (2012) states, “In the context of social research, reflexivity at its most immediately obvious level refers to the way in which the products of research are affected by the personnel and process of doing research” (p. 4). As children of people displaced by war, we are particularly sensitive to the ways students with refugee backgrounds are thought of, addressed, and taught in the public school systems that we too grew up in. During the stages of the creation of the manual and writing of this research we drew on our experiences and expertise deeply to present text, audio-visuals, and interactive tools as well as the research method and writing in ways to uplift the voices and needs of teachers working with marginalized refugee communities in our society.

6. Results

6.1. Qualtrics Survey

To summarize of educators’ survey results, there were 110 users who took the Qualtrics feedback survey to help us improve the manual’s quality. Over 70% of respondents found this EdTech useful, enjoyed the resource, found the design to be high quality, learned relevant information and concepts, and were likely to recommend it to colleagues. Whilst designers added a survey Supporting Teachers to Address the Mental Health to improve the usability of the manual, it also served well for the purposes of this research.

The survey provides us with key information about how this manual is received by educators and potential areas of improvement. The open-ended question “Is there anything you would add to the resource? What could be improved?” in the survey gives more insight into this EdTech for teacher training. Responses fall under three general categories: (1) ways the manual is addressing a resource gap that teachers are experiencing regarding refugee-background students; (2) feedback on content that educators feel the resource needs more material on; and (3) feedback on decolonizing aims of the resource.

Most of the written responses in the manual were comments of appreciation. Comments like “This is an amazing resource! It is very thorough and has many great resources and references” emphasize the need for the manual, highlighting the sections that were most helpful. Another common sentiment is the need for the resource to extend to other Canadian provinces. One respondent wrote: “This resource would be so impactful for Ontario teachers, especially in Toronto. I’ve received a number of newcomer students from war zones, and this information better prepared me to support their diverse needs.” Educators also commented on areas they felt could be improved. These heavily focused on including more research-backed, classroom-based activities in the manual. Finally, the decolonial lens of the manual was highlighted by another educator: “I really appreciate the land acknowledgment video. The video went beyond a basic land acknowledgment and brought in the role [of] the government, and refugees have to understand and respect the people of the land.”

6.2. Pre-Service Teachers’ Responses

Secondary school pre-service teachers’ use of the manual occurred in two elective special topics courses on refugee education. The first group of 33 students reviewed the manual at the end of their course, on 28 July 2023. The EdTech version of the manual on Rise 360 had just been completed by Baroud’s team and students had three days to review it. The students had recently completed their six-week practicums in BC public schools and a couple of the students were early-career teachers. They had a good sense of their needs as teachers working in the region and with refugee-background students. 20 students volunteered verbal feedback on the resources that Noori noted for the purposes of improving the recently developed EdTech. Students flagged grammatical and citation errors and suggested UDL updates like text-voice options and request for PDF versions. Pre-service students requested an increase from two to five interactive activities at the end of each chapter that checked for content understanding. Like the survey respondents, they also wanted more research-backed, in-class activities. They were content with the amount of content and articulated they did not feel overwhelmed with the text. Noori’s reflections of these user’s experiences were brought to Baroud’s team, who then updated the manual accordingly.

Noori observed the second group of pre-service secondary teachers’ cohort the following summer, July 2024. Unlike the class of 2023, these 36 students referred to the manual for the duration of the month-long course. They too had completed their six-week practicum and were nearing the end of their teacher training program; however, this class did not have any in-service teachers. Noori facilitated discussions for each section of the online manual. After a review of the first chapter focusing on the main conflict zones that the Canadian government had promised asylum to, students identified the need to diversify content related to refugee experiences by increasing the information on the refugee-producing countries. The outcome of this identified theme through reflexive analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2020) was addressed by students identifying and providing information on contemporary conflict zones, including places that the Canadian government had not necessarily promised asylum to publicly (i.e., Sudan, Palestine, Congo, Eretria). Groups of six students chose different countries affected by modern warfare; they wrote summaries, chose short documentaries that better explained the conflicts, and presented their country cases to their peers. This theme was not to be confused with another ‘diversity of location: refugee-producing countries’. Noori differentiated resettlement supports teachers should be aware of, separated by provinces. This theme emerged from respondents stating in the Qualtrics surveys the usefulness of the manual in Toronto and not from the engagement from preservice students.

Another major theme that developed from reflexive analysis ‘activities: manual’s content assessment’ are ‘activities: in-person classroom’ as Noori continued to observe and reflect on the 2024 cohort’s engagement with the EdTech. The year before, pre-service teachers identified a need to increase the manual’s quick knowledge assessment activities at the end of each chapter. The short assessment activities of matching, multiple choice and short answer questions at the end of each chapter were increased from two to five by Baroud’s team. The majority of the second cohort students agreed with their predecessors that educators would benefit from more researched pedagogical strategies for refugee-background students, thus identifying the theme and qualities of ‘activities: in-person classroom’. To address this, Noori observed students conduct searches; they reviewed scholarly journals, university press-published books, and websites to find classroom activities for teachers to enhance learning and sense of belonging for refugee-background students. In groups of four or five they presented one or two strategies and then guided their peers through all or part of the strategy they had discovered.

6.3. University’s Curriculum Specialists Report

The university’s curriculum specialists, referred to as Learning Designers, provided expert evaluation of the online manual. The Learning Designers’ feedback falls under two main themes: enhancing accessibility and refining design elements to better serve K-12 public school teachers. The Learning Designers admitted, “We do not have background in this topic to provide feedback on the content other than to note it was informative and interesting to a non-expert.” Their recommendations primarily addressed structural and usability matters. For example, they identified the need for text descriptions accompanying all visuals to improve accessibility and suggested revisions to enhance text clarity and readability. Additionally, they recommended refining instructional language by eliminating redundancies and simplifying procedures to ensure greater clarity. To improve navigation, the Learning Designers proposed incorporating interactive elements such as buttons and new sections be embedded to facilitate ease of use within the EdTech resource. Furthermore, they recommended that if Supporting Teachers to Address the Mental Health were to be expanded to a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), it would benefit from integrating robust assessment tools to enhance engagement and learning outcomes.

6.4. Synthesis

Interpreting the results from survey feedback, pre-service teacher input, and expert evaluations provide critical insights into how EdTech can be leveraged to better support Canadian teachers working with students with refugee backgrounds. The key research question that this paper tries to address is what considerations developers need to have when they create EdTech for Canadian teachers working with refugee-background students? Findings show that by determining EdTech’s role in filling resource gaps, improving access to knowledge and data for educators, and strengthening pedagogical practices, more viable and reflexive answers can be given.

One of the most significant findings is that when Design Justice Principles inform EdTech, it can effectively fill the resource gap that many Canadian teachers experience when working with refugee-background students. Over 70% of survey respondents found the online manual Supporting Teachers to Address the Mental Health useful, well designed, and relevant to their teaching needs. Qualitative feedback reinforced this sentiment, with educators emphasizing the manual provided necessary information they had previously lacked. Most noteworthy, teachers expressed a desire for the resource to be shared with educators in other provinces, underscoring the widespread need for such a tool across Canada. Additionally, pre-service teachers appreciated the manual’s content, but they emphasized the need to include more classroom-based, research-backed activities into the manual. This suggests that for EdTech to be most effective in this context, it must go beyond providing information and offer practical, evidence-based pedagogies that teachers can implement in classes.

A notable difference between 2023 and 2024 pre-service teacher cohort usage is the time and depth of engagement with the manual. The 2023 group only had a few days to read and engage with the manual and provide feedback, whereas the 2024 class used it throughout their month-long course, allowing for reflective discussions and more critical engagement. They also had the opportunity to explore additional conflicts, research teaching strategies, and model activities based on their findings. This demonstrates that EdTech may be more effective when embedded within ongoing professional learning, rather than as a one-time use. Future research with guided use of the resource throughout the school year may be fruitful in optimizing use and application of the manual.

The expert evaluation by the university’s Learning Designers further emphasized the importance of accessibility and usability in EdTech for teachers. While they too found the content informative, their feedback primarily focused on structural improvements, such as having instructional clarity and streamlining navigation. Their recommendations for more complex assessment tools for an expanded version as a MOOC, suggests that educators can become more engaged and retain greater knowledge through reflexive evaluation practices.

7. Discussion

7.1. Summary of Findings

This study demonstrates that participatory and reflexive EdTech informed by Design Justice Principles can meaningfully contribute to the psychosocial, academic, and linguistic needs of refugee-background students. The engagement of pre-service teachers in the elective courses illustrates EdTech’s potential to serve not only as a knowledge resource but also as a collaborative platform for co-creating curriculum. In line with Ratković et al. (2022), who argue that education can be a form of healing for refugee students, the participatory design of the manual fostered agency among teachers, creating a professional development tool that centres trauma-informed and strength-based practices.

These findings also respond to Noori’s (2025, in press) observations that teachers often feel under-resourced and unprepared when working with refugee-background students. The manual, developed with feedback from both novice and experienced educators, provides accessible, user-friendly resources that bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and classroom realities. By embedding culturally responsive practices into the design, the manual affirms Schutte and Milley’s (2023) call for inclusive education that acknowledges refugee students’ complex relationships with institutions. In effect, this manual adds to the slowly growing body of EdTech to improve teacher training through materials that are informed by social justice frameworks geared towards improving practitioners’ engagement with a growing marginalized community of students who have refugee experiences (Chamakiotis & Petrakaki, 2024).

Moreover, the manual’s evolution—guided by iterative feedback from learning designers and in-service educators—aligns with Stewart et al. (2019), who highlight the importance of ongoing professional development in trauma-informed practice. By integrating both pre-service and in-service teacher perspectives, the resource reflects Dryden-Peterson’s (2022) emphasis on collective responsibility in refugee integration. We are contributing to responsible EdTech creation and research meant to train professionals to ultimately foster inclusivity across educational levels for refugees, especially after resettlement.

7.2. Limitations

While the manual shows promise, its initial funding constraints meant that early iterations foregrounded mental health advocacy over linguistic and academic supports. This highlights an ongoing design tension raised by Stewart (2011) and Ferede (2012) that teachers need resources that address the whole child, balancing psychosocial support with academic development. Reflexive analysis of the manual’s content meant that Noori identified a new theme that emerged from critically thinking about the use of ‘resilience’. Future updates will more intentionally engage with the concept of resilience as both a process of navigation towards positive outcomes and a process of negotiation with the wider system (e.g., parents, teachers, community, society) to achieve those outcomes (Ungar, 2008). We are looking to move towards contributing to ‘education resilience’ literature from a critical lens and strength-based pedagogies. Although updates have already incorporated more culturally responsive material, future EdTech iterations must explicitly include strategies for language acquisition and differentiated academic scaffolding (Michalovich, 2024). We plan to design tools in the manual for educators to identify positive educational experiences and outcomes; to scaffold their learning with materials that actively promotes safety, cultivates belonging, and paves the way for academic and personal success of students with refugee backgrounds (Aleghfeli et al., 2025).

Another limitation lies in the affordances of the Rise 360 platform. Accessibility challenges, such as limited support for captions and keyboard navigation, reveal how technical design decisions can inadvertently exclude learners, contradicting UDL principles. This constraint points to a larger issue emphasized in the introduction: the lack of research on how EdTech can be designed to support both refugee-background students and teachers in truly inclusive ways (Barnes et al., 2024; Crompton et al., 2021).

Additionally, while triangulation across surveys, pre-service use, and expert review strengthens our conclusions, the small number (we received voluntary feedback from 20% of the manual’s users) of survey responses limits the generalizability of findings. In line with Levi (2019), more comprehensive data collection embedded into EdTech tools themselves could provide ongoing insights into teacher needs, thereby enhancing the sustainability and relevance of these resources.

7.3. Implications for Policy and Practice

The findings of this study underscore that EdTech can advance trauma-informed, culturally relevant, and decolonizing practices in Canadian K-12 teacher education. Respondents’ appreciation for the manual’s land acknowledgement and refugee-centred narratives support Al Habsi and Rude’s (2021) argument that decolonizing EdTech requires centring marginalized voices. Such design choices respond directly to the psychosocial needs identified by Noori (2025) and Stewart (2011), showing that refugee students benefit when their experiences are validated in classroom resources.

In practice, the development of EdTech for teachers must intentionally embed trauma-informed content that supports educators to recognize and respond to refugee students’ psychosocial needs (Ratković et al., 2022) while also integrating strategies that address linguistic development and cross-cultural understanding (Guo et al., 2019). Equally important is the prioritization of digital equity including accessibility and usability, ensuring multimodal, captioned, and navigable content that supports both teachers and learners (Levi, 2019). Reflexivity and co-creation should also remain central, with iterative feedback loops between teachers, students, and designers ensuring ongoing relevance and inclusivity (Barnes et al., 2024). For policymakers, these findings suggest that investing in context-sensitive and reflexive EdTech is vital to improve teacher preparedness in an era of increasing displacement. As Tobin and Hieker (2021) emphasize, blended learning environments provide flexibility that enables schools to respond to crises, and embedding feedback mechanisms within EdTech can further provide valuable data to shape curricula and inform refugee education policy.

This study reveals that effective EdTech design for Canadian teachers working with refugee-background students requires attention to trauma-informed practice, psychosocial support, cultural and linguistic inclusivity, and participatory, reflexive development. This approach not only strengthens teachers’ capacity to meet students’ diverse needs but also contributes to the broader project of fostering equitable, inclusive, and healing-oriented education systems.