This study builds on a multi-scale ethnography of policies and mundane lives of lower secondary students and teachers with a specific emphasis on recent digitalization initiatives in Swedish schools. The study aims to illuminate the discourses and processes of inclusion and exclusion within contemporary educational digitalization initiatives whose intentions relate to a one-school-for-all agenda. Sociocultural perspectives have been a key point of departure and the discourse analytical framework of Nexus Analysis has been used as a guiding analytical lens. Participant’s deployment of digital tools in educational settings have been scrutinized through interviews, classroom audio and video recordings, and other ethnographic data. In addition, the study draws on analysis of national and school policies related to digitalization initiatives and Sweden’s one-school-for-all ethos. These data come from the research project Digitalization Initiatives, and Practices (DIP, www.ju.se/ccd/dip) where a key focus is the digitalization of the Swedish school system from a perspective of inclusion and exclusion.

With a point of departure in the one-school-for-all discourse, the Swedish school system rests on values like inclusion and compensation – inclusion for all students, irrespective of background, disabilities etc., and compensation of various types of functional disabilities. Framed by the one-school-for-all discourse, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is considered both a tool for inclusion and a compensatory tool in the Swedish school. Therefore, students (and teachers) with documented special needs have had access to digital tools like laptop computers or iPads for quite some time. However, due to the high degree of independence that individual schools and teachers enjoy, access to and usage of digital tools among students without documented special needs is reported to differ considerably, sometimes within the same school. Such previous findings across previous studies led the Government of Sweden to initiate a strategy to digitalize the entire Swedish school system in 2017. This strategy has had three key focus areas:

1. Digital competence for all in the school system.
2. Equal access and usage.
3. Research and follow-up about the possibilities of digitalization.

The first two focus areas highlight the inclusive ambitions of the one-school-for-all discourse. Many secondary schools have started teaching computer knowledge, and the Swedish National Agency for Education (Skolverket) has included affordances and constraints of the digitalization of society in the curricula of different subjects, in particular in the curriculum of mathematics where programming became an integrated part, as a means to fulfill the first focus area of the strategy. A majority of Swedish secondary schools today provide students with digital tools, with the result that the one computer per student ratio has increased dramatically, as a response to the second focus area. However, for students who are diagnosed with a functional disability, an initiative to digitalize the entire student population in a school, creates a paradoxical scenario of exclusion. Thus, as the following examples from our analysis suggest, digital tools for inclusion appear to have turned into tools for exclusion in Swedish lower secondary schools.

1. Before the digitalization initiative, students with special needs were often the only students in the classroom with their own digital tools. This marked them as students with special needs, even thoughthe digital tools provided features which made it possible for them to study at the same pace as their non-marked peers. When all students received digital tools within the framing of the digitalization strategy, the effect was that the compensatory advantage for the students with special needs decreased and they started experiencing a lagging behind effect in educational settings.
2. An outcome of the digitalization strategy was that many schools stopped buying paper editions of textbooks in order to be able to reserve resources for the procurement of digital tools and other digital resources. Therefore, students are currently required to use digitalized textbooks. This offers the possibility to use digital features like text-to-speech, i.e. the written text is synthetically read aloud. Wearing headphones, the students listen to the texts simultaneously while they may read it on their individual screens, something that is easier for students with diagnoses like dyslexia, or those who are new to the named language Swedish. However, the combination of digital tools and headphones tempts students to engage with non-school tasks (like scrolling Spotify playlists or watching YouTube videos) instead of reading an assigned text. This results in students who best need time to study lagging behind in school tasks.

Discourses of compensation and inclusion circulate in the Swedish school system. However, for students with special needs these discourses can imply a further exclusion if this means a compensation and inclusion for mainstream students. After the digitalization strategy was implemented, digital tools have become an integrated part of the Swedish lower secondary classrooms. For students with special needs, digital tools can function as compensatory measures and facilitate learning. However, this study suggests that digital tools for everyone can become counter-productive for students who are marginalized to begin with.

Our analysis highlights and troubles the binary dichotomies of being abled and disabled, or what being a student with special needs implies as compared to those who do not have any diagnoses or special needs. When functionally disabled students or students with special needs are seen as “problems” who can be “fixed” with digital tools, the tools themselves risk becoming hindrances for the students’ educational development. To come to terms with this, students, regardless of prerequisites, need to be understood as individuals with individual needs, and whose needs call for individual solutions that are part of solutions for all students. This study also highlights how a discourse analytical framework of Nexus Analysis can be used to shed light on complex social relationships across different types of data.