Digital Pedagogies Across Diverse Contexts: Co-Creation, Participation and Inclusion

Dear Colleagues,

Digital pedagogy is now central to educational thinking and practice across schools, colleges, universities, community settings and professional learning environments worldwide. Yet as digital technologies become more embedded in teaching and learning, it is increasingly clear that effective digital pedagogy cannot be understood in abstract, universal or one-size-fits-all terms. It is always shaped by context: by culture, language, resource availability, institutional conditions, educational traditions, learner identities and the wider social realities in which teaching and learning take place. For this reason, there is a pressing need to explore digital pedagogies not as fixed models to be transferred across settings but as situated, relational and evolving practices.

At the same time, there is growing interest in forms of digital pedagogy that are more participatory, inclusive and responsive to learners’ lives. Across many sectors, educators and researchers are working to move beyond transmissive or platform-led approaches towards pedagogies that foreground co-creation, learner voice, active participation and meaningful engagement. These shifts are especially timely in light of persistent global inequalities, the diversification of learner populations, the expansion of online and hybrid provision and the rapid emergence of AI and other new technologies. Together, these developments create important opportunities, but also sharp challenges, for those seeking to design digital learning in ways that are educationally rich, socially just and contextually relevant.

This Special Issue aims to present and disseminate the most recent advances related to digital pedagogies across diverse contexts, with particular attention to co-creation, participation and inclusion. We are interested in contributions that examine how digital pedagogies are designed, enacted, negotiated and evaluated across different educational, cultural, linguistic, geographical and socio-material settings. We particularly welcome papers that take context seriously: not as a background detail but as a central element in understanding what digital pedagogy is, how it works, who it serves and what possibilities and limitations it creates.

We invite submissions that explore how co-creation, participation and inclusion are understood in digital pedagogy across varied contexts, including formal, informal and non-formal learning environments. We are keen to receive work that is empirically grounded, critically engaged and relevant to both scholarship and practice. This may include studies of innovation and success but also analyses of tensions, constraints, exclusions and unintended consequences. We welcome a wide range of contributions, including empirical research, case studies, design-based research, evaluative studies, systematic or scoping reviews, critical perspectives, methodological papers and theoretical or conceptual contributions.

Topics of interest for publication include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Digital pedagogies across diverse cultural, geographical and institutional contexts
• Co-creation of curriculum, learning activities and assessment in digital environments
• Learner voice, agency and participation in online, blended and hybrid education
• Inclusive digital pedagogy for diverse learners and communities
• Digital pedagogy in low-resource, multilingual, marginalised or underrepresented settings
• Digital strategies to support learners in fragile or conflict-affected contexts
• Participation and engagement in formal, informal and non-formal digital learning
• Community-based and socially situated digital pedagogies
• Mobile learning and flexible digital pedagogies across contexts
• Student–staff partnerships in digitally mediated teaching and learning
• Belonging, identity and relationality in digital education
• Digital pedagogies for neurodiverse learners and learners with varied access needs
• Intercultural dimensions of digital teaching and learning
• Multilingualism, language diversity and participation in digital pedagogy
• Critical perspectives on learner-centredness, participation and inclusion
• Ethical issues in digital pedagogy, including datafication, surveillance and platform power
• Learner participation and inclusion in AI-mediated or AI-supported education
• Creative, multimodal and collaborative approaches to digital pedagogy
• Assessment and feedback practices that support participation and inclusion
• Educator development for inclusive and participatory digital pedagogy
• Institutional opportunities and barriers in implementing context-responsive digital pedagogies
• The role of technology in widening or narrowing participation across different contexts
• Theoretical, analytical and methodological frameworks for researching digital pedagogy across contexts

We particularly encourage submissions that foreground voices that are often less visible in mainstream digital education debates, including those of learners, practitioners and communities working in diverse, resource-constrained, underrepresented or rapidly changing contexts. We also welcome collaborative authorship and contributions that bridge research and practice.

This Special Issue seeks to open up a richer conversation about digital pedagogy by asking not only what works but what works, for whom, in which contexts and on whose terms. In doing so, it aims to contribute to more inclusive, participatory and contextually grounded understandings of digital pedagogy at a time of significant educational and technological change.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Matt Smith
Dr. Marguerite Koole
Prof. John Traxler
Dr. Hussam Qaddumi
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Education Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• learner-centric digital pedagogies
• co-creation
• participation
• student voice
• student partnership
• mobile learning
• online and blended learning
• inclusive digital pedagogy
• educational technology
• learner agency