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Towards Education Justice: Digital Technologies for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse...
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Towards Education Justice: Digital Technologies for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Communities

A special issue of Education Sciences (ISSN 2227-7102). This special issue belongs to the section "Technology Enhanced Education".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 April 2026) | Viewed by 2177

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Lynde Tan

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Associate Professor, School of Education, Western Sydney University, Bankstown, Australia
Interests: digital literacies; multimodal literacies; language education; teacher education
Prof. Dr. Loshini Naidoo

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
School of Education, Western Sydney University, Penrith, Australia
Interests: equity; access; teacher education; transnationalism

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The aim of the Special Issue is to invite critical engagement with the affordances, limitations, and sociopolitical implications of digital technologies for culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) populations. As digital environments become increasingly central to education, employment, and civic life, the ability to meaningfully participate in digital spaces is now a key determinant of access to opportunity and social inclusion. Despite widespread claims that digital tools enhance inclusion, there remains a critical gap in understanding how these technologies may also reproduce or mask structural inequities, particularly for racialised, migrant, and multilingual communities. 

This Special Issue aims to address this gap by foregrounding education justice as a lens to examine how digital technologies intersect with power, identity, and access. It calls for research that challenges technological determinism and reimagines digital participation in ways that are culturally and linguistically sustaining and socially just. Themes for this Special Issue include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Sustainability, inclusion, and social justice;
  • Decolonising education for digital participation;
  • Education justice and digital inclusion;
  • Culturally relevant, responsible, and sustaining pedagogy;
  • Digital literacies.

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 January 2026.

Associate Prof. Dr. Lynde Tan
Prof. Dr. Loshini Naidoo
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.

Keywords

  • education justice
  • digital inclusion
  • culturally and linguistically sustaining pedagogy
  • sustainability
  • decolonization

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Further information on MDPI's Special Issue policies can be found here.

Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

23 pages, 299 KB  
Article
Language Teacher Candidates’ Voices of Gamified Project-Based Lessons: Unveiling Views and Tensions
by Claudio Diaz, Maria-Jesus Inostroza, Mabel Ortiz, Tania Tagle, Juan Fernando Gómez, Valeria Sumonte and Paola Dominguez
Educ. Sci. 2026, 16(4), 592; https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci16040592 - 8 Apr 2026
Viewed by 461
Abstract
This mixed-methods study explores the views and experiences of 55 English-language teacher candidates in Chile who designed gamified project-based lessons aimed at fostering inclusive learning and social justice in culturally diverse classrooms. Data were collected through lesson plans, semi-structured interviews, and a Likert-scale [...] Read more.
This mixed-methods study explores the views and experiences of 55 English-language teacher candidates in Chile who designed gamified project-based lessons aimed at fostering inclusive learning and social justice in culturally diverse classrooms. Data were collected through lesson plans, semi-structured interviews, and a Likert-scale survey, and were analysed using inductive content analysis and descriptive statistics. The findings reveal that participants valued gamification for enhancing student engagement, collaboration, and critical thinking, and they perceived gains in their ability to integrate social justice themes into language teaching. However, discrepancies emerged when participants had to plan lessons that had a social justice orientation because they perceived they did not have enough competence to approach equity-oriented themes. This study adopts a justice lens that foregrounds power, agency, and digital equity in teacher candidates’ lesson-planning skills to examine how they can redistribute voice, recognise situated knowledges, and expand their capacity to act within and against structural constraints. The study underscores the need for teacher education programmes to move beyond technical and motivational uses of gamification and digital tools. From their lesson plans, teacher candidates were not simply adopting digital tools at a technical level but seem to be designing an integrated pedagogical ecosystem that aligned gamification and project-based learning. However, it is inconclusive whether they are able to design gamified PBL environments that do not reproduce existing social and educational inequalities and ensure that access and participation are carefully scaffolded. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Towards Education Justice: Digital Technologies for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Communities)
17 pages, 555 KB  
Article
A Framework for Co-Designing Social Media Literacy Education with Women from Migrant and Refugee Backgrounds: An Education Justice Approach
by Thilakshi Mallawa Arachchi, Tanya Notley, Loshini Naidoo and Jenna Condie
Educ. Sci. 2026, 16(4), 518; https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci16040518 - 26 Mar 2026
Viewed by 527
Abstract
Social media is an integral part of everyday life for women from migrant and refugee backgrounds and is sometimes recognised as a ‘critical lifeline’ enabling access to essential support during settlement. Despite this, Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) women in Australia often have [...] Read more.
Social media is an integral part of everyday life for women from migrant and refugee backgrounds and is sometimes recognised as a ‘critical lifeline’ enabling access to essential support during settlement. Despite this, Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) women in Australia often have limited and uneven access to critical social media literacy education opportunities, and there remains a lack of in-depth research exploring what CALD women want to learn and how they wish to participate in such educational interventions. Adopting an education justice approach, this article advances a framework for social media literacy education developed with women from refugee backgrounds. The study employed semi-structured interviews and co-design workshops with women from refugee backgrounds, alongside staff from local public libraries and refugee support organisations. The study demonstrates that women from refugee backgrounds primarily use social media for communication and connection, but are also interested in learning how to use these platforms to navigate sexism, racism, and other systemic barriers to settlement. The proposed framework—which can be adopted by public libraries and other grassroots organisations—responds directly to women’s calls for peer-led, value-driven, context-specific, and culturally responsive social media literacy interventions. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Towards Education Justice: Digital Technologies for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Communities)
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