Dear Colleagues,

This Special Edition was produced as part of the UNESCO Chair in Innovative Informal Digital Learning in Disadvantaged and Development Contexts programme. Here is a quick summary of the call for papers:

• We invite you to submit papers to this Special Issue about decolonising the field of educational technology in any and every manifestation.
• “Decolonising” refers to the acts of recognising, confronting and undoing the processes, structures and concepts by which any more powerful country, culture or community physically or remotely oppresses another smaller one, either currently or historically.
• “Educational technology” refers to the hardware, software, products, services, infrastructure, applications and interfaces, as well as the projects, programmes, processes, structures, values, knowledge systems and philosophies that they are situated in.
• We invite submissions on (landscape, policy, product or systematic) reviews, practices, case studies, political economy analysis, evaluations, methodologies, methods and (theoretical, analytical, or conceptual) frameworks that identify and/or challenge the (neo)colonial norms embedded in the field of educational technologies.
• We are conscious that every part of the research publishing cycle itself has also been perpetuating colonial, post-colonial, neocolonial and hegemonic practices. Thus, we explicitly welcome a wide variety of authors with their unique perspectives and styles of writing to contribute to this journal issue—including writers, scholars, practitioners and community members who traditionally lack representation in academic journals.

For further details, please read below.

Decoloniality is broadly defined here as “the dismantling of relations of power and conceptions of knowledge that foment the reproduction of racial, gender and geopolitical hierarchies that came into being or found new and more powerful forms of expression in the modern/colonial world.” (Maldonado-Torres, 2016). We are, however, open to different definitions.

It is vitally important to critically explore educational technology offerings, including hardware, software, infrastructure, applications and interfaces, as well as the projects, programmes, research, processes, structures, values, knowledges and philosophies that they are situated in. Similarly, it is important to critically analyse the actors and systems which these educational technologies are embedded in, asking questions such as “by whom?”, “for whom?”, “who benefits?” and “what are the hidden agendas?”.

To what extent and in what ways are these technologies and systems perpetuating and reinforcing the values, worldviews, institutions, resources and knowledge systems that are entangled with (neo)colonialism? Drawing from Adam et al. (2022), decolonising the field of educational technology includes topics such as:

• Globalising education (e.g., through universal education platforms), such that dominant knowledge (mostly white, western-centric), values, norms and beliefs are promoted to the detriment of those from marginal, non-dominant, local and indigenous groups;
• Western-centric epistemological and pedagogical underpinnings in EdTech that, for example, focus on the individual—their individual learning path, their individual assessments, their arrival at a predetermined completion point—to the detriment of communitarian models of learning or critical pedagogies that centre praxis;
• Dominant languages used to achieve EdTech product scaling, which led to the loss of the conceptual frameworks used by minority languages and, resultantly, the loss of scholarship in minority languages;
• “Core-to-periphery” implementation of EdTech products that, for example, promote a predominantly one-way transmission of standardised knowledge from Western countries to a diverse and complex pool of ‘awaiting’ participants globally;
• Technological design critiques that go beyond looking at user-friendliness and content design, to discussions of who creates EdTech products, who it is designed for and the embeddedness of colonial logics;
• Adverse incorporation (“datafication”) whereby young learners’ thoughts and experiences are tracked and monitored, providing them with a digital footprint that will be with them for the rest of their lives.

Based on Adam et al. (2022), submissions may focus on, but are by all means not limited to:

• Inequity and injustices in online and/or digital education systems;
• Decolonial critiques of technological design, pedagogical design and learning analytics processes;
• Decolonial critiques of open education and/or MOOCs;
• Digital neocolonialism through the technologisation of education;
• Lack of epistemic diversity in EdTech and online education;
• Indigenous knowledges and reclaiming diverse non-Western centric epistemologies in educational technologies;
• Positionality in EdTech researchers.

We invite submissions on (landscape, policy, product or systematic) reviews, practices, case studies, political economy analysis, evaluations, methodologies, methods and (theoretical, analytical or conceptual) frameworks that identify and/or challenge the (neo)colonial norms embedded in the field of educational technologies. We encourage novel, critical and decolonial approaches to tackle the themes as well as foregrounding experiences of those at the margins. Furthermore, we are also open to novel decolonial methodologies.

We are also conscious that every part of the research publishing cycle itself perpetuates colonial, postcolonial and neocolonial hegemonic practices and that we are not always aware of the processes or the details by which this happens. In recognition of the possible hegemonic aspects of the publishing cycle, we welcome a wide variety of authors with their unique perspectives and styles of writing to contribute to this journal issue—including practitioners, scholars and community members who might be ‘hard-to-reach’ or traditionally lack representation in academic journals. We encourage those in early parts of their career to submit papers. For scholars with more experience, we encourage co-authoring with early career scholars, practitioners and the communities you are conducting research with. We are happy to provide informal feedback on ideas and approaches and support the articles that respect authors’ cultural styles/voices and find ways to fit with yet challenge current hegemonic publishing practices.

Dr. Marguerite Koole
Dr. Matt Smith
Prof. John Traxler
Dr. Taskeen Adam
Guest Editors

Shri Footring
Guest Editor Assistant

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 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

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 1400 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.

• decolonisation
• coloniality
• digital
• edtech
• educational technology
• oppression
• education
• marginalisation