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Repositioning the periphery: Advancing equity and inclusion in global digitalised educational research
An invited guest editorial
Thi Thanh Huyen Phuong
Hanoi FPT University, Vietnam
The rapid digitalisation of education is reshaping teaching, learning, and research worldwide. However, the online platforms, artificial intelligence (AI) tools, and data-driven pedagogies driving this transformation are largely developed and circulated from the global North. As result, they often embed Western pedagogies and educational values, and export a narrow vision of educational digitalisation (Gallagher & Knox, 2019). In that scenario, the periphery, which is historically marginalised within global knowledge hierarchies, emerges as a crucial site for understanding how digital education takes shape under diverse social, cultural, and economic conditions. This editorial contends that scholarship from the periphery provides indispensable insights and critiques, which contest the North-driven simplistic view of educational digitalisation, and that amplifying voices from the periphery is essential to advance equity and inclusion in the digital age.
In recent years, research on digitalised education from the periphery, such as Asia and Africa, has become more visible in IIER, adding valuable "missing voices" (Davis, 2015) to the global debates on digitalised education. What is revealed is more than infrastructural deficits; it is the profoundly unequal conditions under which digitalisation is being realised. Research from Vietnam (Phuong, 2025), the Philippines (Espinosa et al., 2025), Cambodia (Sok & Bennett, 2025), and the Maldives (Waheeda et al., 2023) exemplifies that peripheral contexts are often featured with patchy infrastructures, underfunded training systems, and entrenched technological divides, which are not only between North and South but also within nations themselves, particularly the urban-rural divide. These material and systemic constraints force research agendas to foreground the issues of access, equity, and adaptability that are often peripheral, or even invisible in well-resourced settings.
Importantly, this body of research demonstrates that the periphery is not marginal or merely lagging behind. Rather, it exposes the contesting, uneven, and highly contextualised processes of educational digitalisation. For example, Espinosa et al. (2025) showed that technology integration in Philippine education resists simplistic narratives of deficit and provision. Digitalisation here cannot be understood apart from the influences of geography, poverty, and inconsistent governance. The study shows that the "divide" is not simply about access, but about structural inequalities that perpetuate educational marginalisation. Additionally, the Philippines' weak regulatory frameworks and bureaucratic delays further obstruct the process of technology adoption: approvals for technology integration are slow, and policies often fail to reflect local realities, widening the gap between government's vision and the practice of education digitalisation at grassroot level. Therefore, the study positions "digital governance" as a crucial but fragile condition. However, the study, at the same time, reveals creative, context-specific adaptations like radio-based instruction (RBI) in the Alternative Learning System (ALS). This contrasts sharply with the dominant North-driven model of high-tech platforms (MOOCs, AI tutoring systems) and indicates that innovation does not always mean "cutting-edge technology". The authors also discussed the importance of strong leadership along with investments in ICT, which reflects how educational digitalisation in periphery contexts cannot be detached from questions of state capacity and political will.
Other examples from the periphery further illustrate creativity and resilience. In Vietnam, teachers sustained rapport with students during Covid-19, flexibly used multimodal platforms, gamified elements, and several adaptive strategies to manage online classes, maintain student engagement (Le & Johnson, 2022), learning motivation (Phuong, 2022), and course satisfaction (Phuong, 2023), despite limited resources. In South Africa, teachers negotiated their teaching identities and adjusted padagogies in accordance with students' technological preferences, even amid rapid innovation and weak institutional support (Folabit & Loyiso, 2024). In Cambodia, Sok and Bennett (2025) underscored locally developed, Khmer-language MOOCs to better serve teachers' professional development rather than reliance on global North-produced platforms. These practices show that digitalisation in constrained contexts is not passive adoption but active negotiation with scarcity and local conditions. Similarly, when formal teacher training is not sufficient or effective enough, educators often rely on professional learning communities (PLCs), both institutionally organised (Bon & Inpin, 2024) and self-initiated (Phuong, 2025), to bridge systemic gaps. The hybrid model of training and PLC-based support emerging in these settings offers a relevant lesson for rethinking professional development globally.
The rise of AI technologies recently has brought about an even more disruptive wave that reshapes the educational landscape at an unprecedented speed. Though these technologies seem largely popular and warmly welcomed by learners in the periphery (Aini et al., 2024), they, like earlier forms of technology, or even to a greater extent, could generate challenges and exclusions. As a lecturer teaching English at university level in Vietnam, I am experiencing firsthand the mounting pressure on lecturers to adapt teaching and assessment in AI-mediated learning environments. Similar pressures are likely, if not already, filtering down to teachers in lower levels of education, where institutional support is often weaker and policy guidance is more fragmented (Phuong, 2025). What strikes me most, as I draft this editorial, is the ambivalence among my colleagues: their enthusiasm in experimenting with freely available AI tools to enrich students' language learning being tempered by their confusion, anxiety, and even fear about ethical issues, fairness in assessment, and the absence of institutional frameworks.
These concerns manifest the responsibilities placed on teachers without corresponding structural support to integrate technology in both teaching (see also Phuong, 2025) and proffessional development (Sok & Bennett, 2025). While some of Vietnamese educators' experiences may resonate with those of educators elsewhere, others are distinctly shaped by the constraints and possibilities of a periphery context. For example, in IIER 35(2), Al-Kadi's (2025) study of language teachers' public comments in social media reveals public resistance of AIs. Their anxiety and concerns are mainly related to ethical issues and pedagogical challenges rather than to the exercise of teachers' agency in the face of infrastructural and support deficit. In this sense, periphery educators' struggles and innovations do not just echo global debates but also contribute fresh perspectives on what highly contextualised integration of AIs might look like.
Additionally, AIs may also trigger deeper transformation in teachers' professional identities. For instance, non-native English-speaking teachers in the global South, who have long grappled with questions of legitimacy in providing spoken English models (Phuong, 2021), may feel even more insecured in classrooms where AI tools can deliver authentic input and personalised feedback. This situation not only highlights the evolving roles of teachers but also how AI technology could unsettle long-established teacher identity. In better-resourced contexts, identity concerns may mainly centre on the depowering of teachers due to the automation of tasks such as feedback provision and grading (Al-Kadi, 2025) while educators in the periphery, especially those in language teaching profession, would struggle for legitimacy due to deepening language hierarchies. The responsibility of educators, researchers, and policymakers in the periphery, therefore, extends beyond the effective integration of AI into education. It also involves critically re-imaging the contours of teacher identity development, and supporting the ongoing processes of identity construction and re-construction in an era where human expertise and machine capacity are deeply entangled.
As such, digitalised education in periphery is not simply a story of catching up but one of negotiation, resistance, and transformation. Far from being peripheral, these contexts are critical laboratories where the global promises and pitfalls of digitalisation unfold. They remind us that the periphery is not a passive space of data extraction but an active hub of knowledge production.
Therefore, creating spaces for voices from the global South is of critical importance. In IIER 33(3), Atkinson and McBeath (2023) discussed the concept of "voices" in IIER publications. Though their discussion is rooted on the political discourse, the editors highlighted that "voices" are often associated with marginalisation, supression, and periphery perspectives in education that demand recognition and empowerment. Extending this, the editors re-confirmed IIER's commitment to amplifing diverse, under-represented voices, which is consistent with the journal's priority for inclusion, equity, and diversity as outlined in Editorial 30(4) (Atkinson, 2020) and reiterated in Editorial 35(1) (Atkinson & McBeath, 2025). This commitment is especially vital in the publishing landscape where periphery researchers face mutiple barriers, including particularly the devaluation of periphery's educational issues and periphery-produced knowledge, together with the gate-keeping force of high processing charges (Groenewald & Teise, 2024). Against this backdrop, IIER, as an independent, open-access journal with an inclusive vision, is promoting meaningful participation across the global South, and thereby contributing essential insights to a fuller understanding of global educational digitalisation and enhancing equity and inclusion in global education.
Looking ahead, it is vital that IIER continues to shed light on the unexplored dimensions of educational digitalisation in the periphery, such as the struggles of educators as they reform and renegotiate their professional identities amid multi-layered challenges, or the unique pathways in which they create to integrate technology, including AI, into their classrooms. By amplifying these experiences, IIER not only enriches global understanding of digitalisation but also strengthens its role as a platform for equity, inclusion, and knowledge co-construction across diverse contexts.
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| Author: Dr Thi Thanh Huyen Phuong is a lecturer and researcher in the Department of English at Hanoi FPT University, Hanoi, Vietnam. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7874-9658 Email: huyenptt3@fe.edu.vn Please cite as: Phuong, T. T. H. (2025). Repositioning the periphery: Advancing equity and inclusion in global digitalised educational research. Issues in Educational Research, 35(3), invited guest editorial viii-xii. http://www.iier.org.au/iier35/phuong-2.html |