Conference Agenda

Digitalisation has profoundly reshaped the conditions of teaching, altering how teachers communicate, enact presence, and build relationships with learners. Despite extensive research on teachers’ digital competence and digital literacy, relational aspects of teaching remain under-theorised. This paper addresses this gap by exploring how teachers describe their relational strategies in digital learning environments and by advancing the concept of Teachers’ Digital Relational Competence (TDRC) as a dimension of professional digital literacy and relational pedagogy in online educational space.

Viewing education as a relational practice (Bingham & Sidorkin, 2004), our aim is to explore how teachers describe their efforts to create qualitative teacher-student relations online, and to interpret how this aligns with the the theoretical framework of teachers’ relational competence (Aspelin & Jönsson, 2019). Our research questions are:

• How do teachers describe their relational practices in digital learning environments?

• How can these practices inform the theoretical development of TDRC?

Empirically, the study draws on open-ended questionnaire responses from 123 Swedish-speaking teachers in Sweden and Finland, all with experience of online teaching. Using a reflexive thematic analysis, teachers’ descriptions of relational practices were first analysed inductively, followed by a theory-driven analysis using Aspelin and Jönsson’s (2019) framework of teachers’ relational competence (TRC) as sensitising concept to examine how digital conditions impact teachers’ relational work.

The findings show that teachers’ relational practices remain central in online education but are enacted differently due to altered temporal and spatial conditions. Teachers describe deliberate strategies to compensate for reduced physical co-presence and limited access to embodied cues. Three clusters of strategies were identified pertaining to the framework’s subcompetencies: communicative strategies (e.g. dialectic multimodality, didactic foresight, and managing visibility), socioemotional strategies (e.g. emotional guidance, validation, and affective regulation), and differentiation strategies (e.g. regulating closeness and distance, enabling learner agency, and maintaining professional boundaries). Across these clusters, teachers emphasised anticipatory intentional design, as well as in situ sensitivity and responsiveness as key relational capacities in digital contexts.

Conceptually, we conclude that TDRC constitutes a reconfiguration of teachers’ relational competence through the entanglement of human and technological actors in digital learning ecologies. Digital embodiment and relational agency emerge as central features, highlighting how teachers use digital affordances to convey presence, support psychological safety, and empower learners to participate on differentiated terms. By framing TDRC as an integrated relational capacity enacted through digital modalities, the paper contributes to ongoing discussions on professional digital literacy and relational pedagogy. The study concludes by outlining implications for teacher education, professional development, and future research on relational work in digital and postdigital education.

Across Europe, adult basic education is increasingly shaped by rapid digital transformation and the growing presence of artificial intelligence in everyday services, learning environments, and administrative processes. For adults with low literacy skills, these developments intensify existing inequalities and risk reinforcing exclusion from social participation. In this context, digital inclusion cannot be reduced to access to devices or connectivity; it requires meaningful, learner-centred use of digital tools that aligns with learners’ everyday practices, motivations, and capabilities (Reder, 2015; Grotlüschen et al., 2020). Against this backdrop, the increasing visibility of AI-supported applications further intensifies the need for pedagogical orientation in adult basic education.

This paper introduces and reflects on an orientation framework for the pedagogical analysis of digital tools in adult basic education. The framework is designed to support adult educators in making informed decisions about the use of digital and AI-supported applications in non-formal and open learning contexts. It responds to a challenge shared across European adult education systems: an expanding and rapidly changing digital landscape combined with limited pedagogical guidance for assessing the suitability of digital tools for learners with low literacy (European Commission, 2020; Cedefop, 2020).

Conceptually, the framework builds on Reder’s Digital Inclusion Pathway, which understands digital inclusion as a gradual and non-linear process encompassing access, the development of digital taste, and readiness for engaging with digital media, while conceptualising digital literacy as an individually shaped and context-dependent outcome rather than a fixed end stage (Reder, 2015). Extending this model, the orientation framework shifts the analytical focus from access to meaningful use, foregrounding motivation, usability, and relevance for learners’ everyday lives. The concept of digital taste plays a central role in this process, as it highlights learners’ interests, preferences, and confidence as key conditions for sustained engagement with digital media (David, Langer, & Koppel, 2022).

The guiding research question of the paper is:
How can an orientation framework support adult educators in evaluating and selecting digital and AI-supported tools that foster meaningful digital inclusion in adult basic education?

Empirically and methodologically, the framework is informed by findings from a multi-year research project on digital media use in adult basic education, in which heuristic evaluation methods were developed and applied to analyse the suitability of digital learning programmes and everyday digital tools for adults with low literacy (Koppel, 2017; Koppel & Langer, 2020). The evaluation criteria address key dimensions of inclusive learning environments, including learnability, self-descriptiveness, perceptual guidance, task appropriateness, controllability, joy of use, and intercultural sensitivity. Rather than producing normative rankings of tools, the framework is explicitly designed as a reflective analytical instrument that supports professional judgement and pedagogical decision-making.

While the digital tools analysed in the underlying studies are predominantly German-language applications, the paper argues for the transferability of the framework to other European contexts. The orientation framework focuses on structural and pedagogical challenges that are widely shared across adult education systems, such as heterogeneous learner groups, uneven digital experiences, limited instructional time, and increasing expectations to integrate digital and AI-based solutions responsibly. One exemplary application is briefly discussed to illustrate how the heuristic logic can be applied beyond its original context.

Positioned within Network 06 (Open Learning: Media, Environments and Cultures), the paper contributes to European debates on digital inclusion, professionalisation in adult education, and the responsible use of emerging technologies. By framing the orientation framework as a boundary object between research, practice, and policy, it offers a theoretically grounded yet practice-oriented approach to supporting educators in moving from access to meaningful digital participation in adult basic education.

As datafication, algorithmic governance and AI-driven tools increasingly shape what counts as educational knowledge, educational research faces profound epistemic challenges. While digital technologies promise efficiency and enhanced access to information, they also risk narrowing educational epistemologies, privileging abstraction, prediction and quantification over relational, affective and socio-material forms of knowing (Selwyn, 2019). In this paper, I argue that visual and participatory pedagogies constitute vital counter-epistemologies in this context. By grounding knowledge in embodied perception, attentiveness and interpretive dialogue, such approaches resist the disembodiment characteristic of AI-mediated knowledge production and re-anchor educational inquiry in lived experience.

My argument draws on a participatory visual pilot study conducted with MA students at the European University Cyprus. As part of a course on Sociocultural Issues in Education, I designed an assignment asking students to photograph the “architecture of disability” in their everyday surroundings while adopting the perspective of a person with a disability. This task required learners to leave the classroom, move through public spaces and document how accessibility—or exclusion—is materially encoded in ordinary infrastructures. Photography here functioned as embodied inquiry: it slowed down perception, activated emotional and ethical responses, and cultivated forms of noticing that are rarely elicited in screen-based learning environments (Rose, 2016; Pink, 2013; Banks, 2007; Harper, 2002).

Students’ photographs illuminated missing ramps, narrow corridors, broken elevators and uneven sidewalks, mundane elements that reveal the normative assumptions embedded in built environments. Yet the most significant outcome was the shift in students’ perception and ethical orientation. Many described discomfort, empathy, or even a sense of responsibility as they attempted to inhabit an unfamiliar embodied perspective. These affective and perceptual shifts align with disability studies insights into the politics of visibility and normativity (Garland-Thomson, 1997; Mitchell & Snyder, 2000; Siebers, 2008; Garland-Thomson, 2005).

In subsequent classroom dialogues, students collectively interpreted the visual material, debating their meanings and tracing the structural roots of exclusion. This dialogic dimension aligns closely with principles of critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970; hooks, 1994), which emphasise shared inquiry, critical reflection and the co-production of knowledge. The visual artefacts democratized classroom participation, enabling students who felt less confident with theoretical discourse to contribute meaningfully through multimodal expression. The process positioned learners as co-investigators, challenging hierarchical knowledge relations embedded both in classroom settings and in broader AI-driven knowledge systems.

I argue that visual and participatory pedagogies challenge AI-driven epistemologies in three key ways. First, they restore embodiment to knowledge production, recognising that perception and movement shape understanding in ways algorithms cannot replicate. Second, they reassert situated knowing by grounding inquiry in socio-material contexts rather than decontextualized datasets. Third, they cultivate ethical and political imagination by helping learners perceive not only what exists but also what could and should exist.

Situated within broader debates on educational knowledge production in times of poly-crisis, this paper positions visual pedagogy as an ethical and political commitment. As AI threatens to further abstract educational research from lived realities, visual and participatory methodologies help safeguard democratic, relational and human forms of knowing. Ultimately, I argue that these approaches offer powerful resources for cultivating forms of seeing, knowing and acting that are essential for responding to the complex challenges facing contemporary education.