Digitizing Inclusion in a Changing World: Comparing insights into four European countries for matching new global realities

Inclusion and digitalization are among the driving forces in global discourses on education and learning. These global realities cause extensive transformations at local, national, and international levels. At the same time, the goal of inclusion is directly interwoven with local conditions, understandings, and historically grown valuations. The concept oscillates between universally shared norms and highly divergent local implementations. Regarding the focus of the symposium it can be assumed that especially in the course of digitalization as one main reaction of the corona
pandemic, learning materials are not only expected to be inclusion oriented but also need to be combinable with digital demands to address alls kinds of inequalities amongst students appropriately. Learning materials thus are a central momentum to expatiate on transformations of
a changing world. In correspondence with the congress theme, the symposium will therefore discuss how a reflection on centrifugal forces of interdependence and individuality can be located in the context of the immediate everyday life in schools and educational practice.
In order to be able to discuss these tensions and current changes within educational practices starting from learning materials, an anchor point is needed in order to open up the international comparison of local specifics. The anchor point for this symposium is a criteria catalog which enables the international comparison of learning materials in their cultural contexts and provides a visualization of local particularities in the field of learning materials (Vogt et al. 2021). If these results are put into relation with the inclusive landscapes in different countries, further insights of relevance for inclusion as a global topic can be generated. The data basis springs from the ITM project (2018-2021, funded by Erasmus+) and other international collections of material.
Speakers with expertise in regard to the triangulation of learning materials, inclusion and digitalization from four European universities (Ostrava, Czech Republic; Bielefeld, Germany; Luxemburg and Örebro, Sweden) present their findings in the symposium, more in-depth
talks about national perspectives as well as a concluding wrap up. The following research questions are a guideline for each section of the symposium:
1. What are the local specifics and constellations as well as understandings of inclusion as a global reality that are being mirrored in teaching material?
2. How can the international comparison of teaching material impact the advancement of inclusion on a local level?
3. How can international comparative educational research become a driving force in the productive negotiation of globally relevant tensions?
The contributions are methodologically based on group discussions and expert interviews about selected learning materials, their quality and criteria for evaluating them. These exchanges have been evaluated with the qualitative content analysis by Mayring (2015). Discourse analysis and context analysis were applied. Furthermore, source corpora of learning material were developed and materials were examined using a qualitative content analysis. This refers to the ITM project from Luxembourg, Örebro and Bielefeld University (Erasmus funding line, 2018-2021) as well as the contribution by Ostrava University. The material mainly comes from primary school education and takes into account various subjects, e.g. mathematics and natural sciences. By looking at the results of the interviews and the analysis of teaching materials as well as on the findings about the cultural and local conditions the presenters were able to develop a deeper understanding about how learning materials are set up for inclusive learning processes and about the underpinning understanding of inclusion in different cultural settings. This is the needed foundation to contextualize everyday practices of teaching and learning with the demands of education within the digital condition.