Keywords

While there is some certain inevitability around the digital age and the mediation of virtually everything through technology, do you as the editors envisage a place for critique as well? Let me offer some context. The world is entering what is arguably a fundamentally new episode in the digital age, characterised by innovations such as AI with ChatGPT that will read, write and even tell stories for us—the stories we want to hear or think we want to hear. Surely, there are also counter-movements, as there have always been, that argue for things like ‘digital detox’, biophilia and reconnecting with people and places unmediated by technology using all the senses. Are they in themselves a sustainability perspective?

We sense in your question the dream of connecting with reality in an unmediated fashion. A reality that can be experienced in all its richness without technology as window to that reality. Of course, there will always be a place for such experiences (echoing Rousseau [1] in the 1700s when he evoked personal reveries in his mind and associated sensations), and yet we as humans always tend to share these kinds of experiences through languages interwoven with media that have taken shape and evolved over time.

As Bolter and Grusin [2] suggest, with the introduction of each new media there has been a new twist in the promise of a logic of immediacy (closer to unfettered experience itself and authentic) which paradoxically introduces at the same time a logic of hypermediacy (‘experience of the medium is itself an experience of the real’ and authentic, p. 71). They offer several examples, such as painting adopting the use of linear perspective in the Renaissance (op.cit., pp. 24–25). We might consider visiting the Eiffel Tower and saying to ourselves with melancholy, that it looks and feels in a strange unfathomable way less real than the postcard we have at home on the fridge or the movie set in Paris we watched the night before.

In this book we are not suggesting that an immediate experience is impossible, rather that when it is mediated by the digital or other forms. Accordingly, our experience of the real and the authentic becomes more complex and interacts with (rather than is separated from) these different media. The digital is one such media and by no means the only media. It is simply one, following in the footsteps of many for thousands of years.

Irabinna Rigney, a descendant of the Narungga, Kaurna and Ngarrindjeri Peoples of South Australia, once related to one of the editors (Dobson) that as an educationalist he was interested in among other things, the role of children in rock painting in the distant past. While very old rock art maybe visible to anybody who views it in person or via different media (e.g. photographs), understanding the stories and cultural knowledge they embody and share is governed by the custodians of these works, such that:

(…) rock art are part of broader sharing and transmission of knowledge that follows social and cultural protocols that cut across generations of people and media. Sharing stories around a campfire, performing songs and dances for tourists, or in ceremonial contexts, creating artworks for an emerging art market or in rock shelters, all unfolded people’s life-worlds…a key feature of rock art is its ability to act as an intergenerational media allowing the transmission of knowledge, gender identity, and power relations to unfold ([3], p. 77).

The point we are making is that as humans we have been using different media for thousands of years and that rock art past and present is one such media with an origin that predates digital media by thousands and thousands of years.

With each new media, different kinds of uncertainty, fears and anxiety have always existed. With the arrival of the handheld calculator for example, people feared children would no longer bother (or need) to develop skills in mental arithmetic and your comments questioner while undoubtedly important, might be indicative of fears concerning the loss of or a transformation of an experience or a skill. Footnote 1 Contemporary debates on open access are another case in point. They bring to the fore thoughts about inclusion as a right for all, balanced by concerns about the value of credentials obtained via the medium of open access micro-credentials and MOOCs, and potentially stored by individuals or organisations in not necessarily transparent or open blockchain systems [4].

We do agree counter movements and critique are important in each new twist in the use of media. ‘Digital detox’ will have a place as you note. Pendergast and Dobson [5] draw attention to the fashion to offer human books to those visiting a library i.e. you can request to talk with one of them in person, hear their story and ask them questions. It is not the case that the human book is superior to a pre-recorded audio book on a digital platform. It is more a question of difference with each having their place. For somebody who lives a long way from physically attending the library, the audio book will be important as a signifier and experience of inclusion that is different to that of the in-person experience of the human book.

The human book idea dates has its origin in Denmark in 2000 at the annual Roskilde music festival and has spread to over 80 countries. It is known as the Human Library movement,Footnote 2 where one of its goals is to increase empathy and understanding and offer a safe space for dialogue. It has to be noted that is it often found at events, rather than as a physical library.

Of course, we do have to keep in mind that even the human book with time might also be a three-dimensional digital avatar anticipating any questions with answers, and as such transportable across time and space so all can be included with access to a person’s stories and knowledge.

It is our view that critique of the arrival of new twists in digital media, such as AI and ChatGPT must not be based on turning time backwards to the presumption (real or imagined) of some pristine, pre-digital experience; even though one of the editors [6] has highlighted how the viva or oral might for the time being at least, offer a way of identifying an authentic in-person performance and sharing of a student’s knowledge as opposed to an AI generated written submission of an assignment on behalf of the student.

Where is the critique of the digital in this book? Where is the kind of raised consciousness (conscientisation) Paulo Freire [7] would be calling for in light of all this, to transgress the colonisation of the mind and the new forms of exclusion digitally mediated education, learning and, indeed what storytelling might lead to if you are excluded from participation?

You write that you like the excerpt in our edited collection:

With historical hindsight, we will do well to reconsider what the railway journey offered: the ability to visually reflect upon and design a personal world without leaving the carriage. With the digital production of teaching and learning, we too are now called upon to reflect upon and design a world of learning without leaving our seat in front of a digital screen.[8]

In pre-digital times, the railway window allowed you to observe the landscape that was sliding by, to turn your gaze to where your eyes were drawn to, contemplating, reflecting, or to turn to the compartment you were in, the people around you, having a conversation perhaps.

Nowadays, people in trains are in a perpetual state of distraction, suffering from short attention spans, when not looking to a screen, thinking about reasons to go back to their screen, in the meantime the landscape is still sliding by, possibly a little dryer and less biodiverse when it was back then, but is anybody noticing, does anybody care?

For the editors, the promise of the digital will always in our minds be concerned with inclusion and seeking ever larger circles or welcoming pathways to inclusion (—with the important caveat as suggested above, that some knowledge and skills must respect cultural protocols on access and understanding, as defined by Traditional Owners and First Peoples). We do acknowledge that it will take time to offer access to all other kinds of knowledge and skills, but the digital does provide a way of overcoming the tyranny of distance or other exclusionary practices e.g. for those who do not live within physical access or face disability issues of different kinds.

Inclusion also means for us as editors and for other contributors to this volume, the opportunity to consider digital ways of working with and not for the disadvantaged so they can develop a voice to communicate and share their experiences. This is about raising skills and not merely awareness; the latter is but the first stage in Freire’s [7] understanding of conscientisation, followed by skill enhancement.

To be clear, there are four main propositions in this edited collection:

  • It is about inclusion in education for all and we reference in particular SDG 4; without discounting that learning about the other SDGs through education is also an opportunity and aspiration worthy of consideration.

  • It is more than about the achievement of inclusion. It is about the learning of inclusion. Specifically, by what means and with the desire to include those who are disadvantaged in some way, so they can additionally experience and themselves create social belonging.

  • It is with the disadvantaged and not for the disadvantaged defined in a broad sense. The latter (i.e. for) implies a project of learning inclusion founded upon positions and structures of dependence between the educator and the disadvantaged, rather than working jointly and equally together with the goal of empowering the voice and sense of belonging of the disadvantaged; and thereafter being empowered to move from the role of digital bystander to digital upstander at their own volition. Hence the title of this book, which might ring a touch grammatically incorrect or cumbersome in the ears of the reader with our preference to use the term with rather than the term for: Learning Inclusion in a Digital Age. Belonging and Finding a Voice with the Disadvantaged.

  • Lastly, the topic of the book is also that of the digital, which whether we like it or not, is encroaching on and being interwoven with ever new parts of our existence.

As editors we would also like to comment on the point you raised above, namely, ‘the perpetual state of distraction, suffering from short attention spans, when not looking to a screen, thinking about reasons to go back to their screen.’

And in so doing we will take up an equally important question you raise:

If we cannot have deep relations and connections with people, places, other species, and ‘matter’ then why will people bother to care for them?

While there is some purchase in the view that we are increasingly distracted to, rather than from the digital world and when in this world our attention span is tested by the next digital moment, whatever it might hold for us. As editors we wish to take this opportunity to draw the questioner’s attention to an alternative different view, one offered by McCallum et al. [9] in the midst of COVID. This was a time in when school teachers were concerned about the distractions offered to students who were not present in classrooms, but learning away from traditional classroom and at home, through the sole medium of digitally communicated lessons.

These authors suggest that we might all learn to design our learning so it adopts something of what we can take from online gaming. Not it must be said that we should make all learning a form of gamification and thus low stakes play that can be discounted at the flick of a switch (—when the game is turned off). Rather, we can learn from the manner in which online, ‘gaming is also a deeply social activity that allows for complex interactions and learning without the physical presence of anything more than a screen.’ This speaks to the need for participants to feel a sense of social belonging and this belonging engages them over time so they might experience a sense of willing engagement and absorption.

This engagement and absorption is most commonly understood in its purest form as an experience of ‘flow’, as popularised by the work of Csikszentmihalyi [10], with effortless concentration when learning and also belonging can be felt. It is important to note it may be for longer or shorter moments, and those experiencing it may not feel distracted by music around them, an adjacent television screen or even a view from a railway carriage. But the point remains, they are engaged, absorbed and open to learning as this takes place.

Teachers have long known of these flow experiences with a different terminology, blikk for øyeblikk as it is termed in Norwegian; meaning an awareness of the moment of contingency when the students are most clearly ready to engage with and learn a key point of knowledge or a skill [11]. Teachers know that the sustained concentration of students for minutes on end is an ambition and but rarely realisable.

Does this mean we are destined to wait for these moments and they are at best sporadic? In a sense we can prepare for such moments, but we must acknowledge that all students and the disadvantaged who are the topic of this book will learn at different paces and in different moments. As a corollary, there is no one size fits all way of teaching knowledge and skills. Learning to include and being included in this learning requires an eye, let us call it blikk for øyeblikk (an eye for the moment of contingency), that acknowledges and accommodates diversity.

With this in mind the chapters in this collection offer the reader when considered together a glimpse of a tapestry of difference, where moments of distraction and moments of on-task activity are clearly evident differentially among the book’s subject, both the educators and the disadvantaged. Most importantly for a book exploring with and not for the disadvantaged, the roles of educator and educated can be exchanged, as they should be in a natural co-learning and mutually respectful sharing of knowledge and skills.

As McCallum et al. [9] conclude and we as editors would concur:

The key lies in our definition of distraction. Screen learning must involve distracting students towards the things that really matter. In education, as in gaming, we can “court risk” without the fear of failing. Rather than admonishing learners for not focusing when sitting at desks in school or in front of screens, we should work within our distracted world. We need to play with distraction, work with distraction and learn with distraction.

Paradoxically, distraction may not be the enemy, it could be the gateway to more attentive learning.

When we are using digital devices are we not willingly and, mostly, hopefully unwilling, serving globalizing and homogenizing companies? These companies thrive on algorithms and the mining of people’s minds (as the last frontier, in a way) through cookies they accept and the data they provide (as well as shareholders)?

When walking through the forest or telling stories around the campfire (or anywhere), we are not making any company any money.

A point well-made about the ‘globalizing and homogenizing companies that thrive on algorithms and the mining of people’s minds’. However, we would also remind the questioner that this book is about speaking back, gaining and regaining a voice and equipping the disadvantaged to speak about matters that they define as important and close to hand or matters occurring globally, upon which they also wish to comment, irrespective of proximity to their own often more immediate life experiences.

For us as editors we are seeking to describe how social belonging can be achieved in an active sense, in spite of the forces you suggest. So, participants can at their own volition move from being digitally bystanders to digital upstanders and at times in the opposite direction. It is of course just as necessary to acknowledge that through watching, learning can take place.

Of course, walking through a non-digital and hence ‘real’ forests or telling stories around the non-digital and hence real campfire may be an opportunity to escape the grasp of those wishing to make money from our use and presentation of stories on digital platforms. Different permutations are also possible, such as recounting and making digital stories in and around real settings or making and sharing digitally mediated stories in digital settings.

For us, it is the quality of the stories, digital or not, and what they speak to and with whom that is the key.

As questioner, I do wonder how this edited collection would resonate in the global south in the slums of Mumbai, where access to clean drinking water is problematic; where many people may possess mobile phones and spend a large part of their limited income on feeding the phone? This is probably too much to bring in but—who is the ‘we’ in this book? How do you reflect upon your own positionality?

There is always a balance between spending and consumption and the choices this requires. If asked to weigh clean water on the scales against digital accessibility as a source of biological survival, all would presumably choose water in preference to the digital. Let us pause for a moment and consider what we can learn from Adorno’s [12] famous essay entitled Education After Auschwitz, originally given as a radio talk in the 1960s, where he states that ‘the most important demand placed upon all education is that Auschwitz [does] not happen again’. He concludes that education must work on different levels, so policy makers, corporate business, groups and individuals all share the responsibility to educate in a humanistic fashion and to not treat people as objects that can be sacrificed. In simple terms, all must join forces to resist the conditions that might lead to such an occurrence.

Taking this point on board, in this book we identify how our share of responsibility as educators entails weighing clean water above digital connectivity and in so doing highlighting how one is directly essential to life and the other less so. On the other hand, we would also note as educators how digital connectivity can be a means to supporting what Freire [7] called conscientisation as a conscious awareness of the choices at stake.

Lastly, I appreciate the editors make connections with some of the SDGs—but in the end again, it is about a more relational way of being in the world where the question is not: with what SDGs does the book connect most? But rather: how do all SDGs connect with this book? In the end they all do and where we find it hard to make the connection, the task we need to attend to requires putting in more effort to see it.

In all books about the Sustainable Development Goals choices have to be made [13]. Our book positions itself in the field of education and is most closely aligned to the SDG 4 about life long learning for all. In particular, we are interested in adult education and thus those who are already adults or those who will in the not-too-distant future crossover into the adult world, without making this age dependent. In the first part of the book, we consider the role of policy in learning inclusion and have cause to also reference SDG 3 with an emphasis on health and wellbeing. We also highlight the importance of SDG 11 on sustainable cities and communities with a connection to social belonging. We identify UNESCO’s Global Network of Learning Cities as an important initiative in this respect, but so too rural and remote communities. Cities and the rural and remote communities all share an interest in community, social belonging and the relations between peoples and cultures whatever their population size. And is it not the case that for some the city in which they have grown up in, is but made up of multiple re-assuring smaller villages that have grown into each others; simply put one community made up of many communities?

This book is about the concepts and theories that are important in understanding learning inclusion and how they help us understand how it exists as different lived forms of life. Embracing this by drawing upon Wittgenstein, concepts and theories ‘bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life’ ([14], p. 11). Moreover, as intimated throughout this conversation, the book is not merely about the science (episteme) of learning inclusion, understood as the concepts and theories. The chapters in Part II and III of the book are about showing how this knowledge is acquired and learnt and used/applied as skills (tēchne) through a number of different examples. Accordingly, digital storytelling and creating books to aid literacy in different languages occupy centre stage in this book.

We have also in the above conversation with the questioner considered the importance of different values, such as water vs. the digital to take an example. This echoes what Aristotle [15] many years before identified as the importance of phronesis i.e. the learned ability to make (ethically informed) judgements in a case-by-case manner, considering all the different sides of an argument with multiple forms of evidence, experience and insight. Simply put, the ability and confidence to make a well-founded judgement that is inclusive and sensitives to the interests of all. It is worth noting that the so-called modern call that students must develop critical thinking, is in many senses nothing more than a further twist or weave in the learned ability to acquire and demonstrate the use of phronesis. A phronesis that is sensitive to the needs of all but founded upon different forms of knowledge (episteme) and skills (tēchne) and the use of them.

So, it may well be, when you the questioner talks of a learned critique and we the editors of learning phronesis supported by an understanding of episteme and tēchne—our differences are actually less than our similarities, as we ultimately share the same language game and form of life, one based upon, ‘Learning Inclusion in a Digital World. Belonging and Finding a Voice with the Disadvantaged.’