A discursive psychological examination of educators’ experiences of children with disabilities accessing the Internet: a role for digital resilience

Educators have an increasingly important role in supporting children with disabilities to connect with and through the Internet. Children with disabilities encounter more risks in connected environments than their peers. These risk experiences are likely to escalate quicker and have more serious impacts for children with disabilities. Yet this group receive less support from educators in their connected lives. Taking this juxtaposition as our starting point, we used purposive sampling to recruit a range of educators who support children with disabilities aged 8–16 years. We used online semi-structured interviews to collect data from 30 educational professionals over a 5-month period (May–September 2021). Our thematic discourse analysis identified three main themes depicting how educators experience and make sense of the connected lives of children with disabilities: fortresses and frontiers, patrolling the borders and getting comfortable with the uncomfortable. Our analysis illustrates how educators make use of widely available binary talk related to ‘online’ risks to create simplified versions of safe (fortress) and unsafe (frontier) spaces. This meant educators frequently positioned their role as restricting access to unsafe spaces. Alternative mobilisations enabled educators to reconstruct short-term online risk experiences as experiential learning opportunities in the lifelong pursuit of supporting children with disabilities to build and show digital resilience. We conclude by illustrating how educators should embrace the increasingly connected lives of children with disabilities through a digital resilience lens, becoming exploration guides not simply restrictive protectors.教育工作者在支持残障儿童接入并通过互联网开展活动方面的作用日益凸显。残障儿童在联网环境中面临的风险较同龄普通儿童更多，此类风险体验的升级速度更快，且对残障儿童造成的影响也更为严重。然而该群体在网络生活中获得的教育工作者支持却相对不足。基于这一矛盾对立的现状作为研究起点，我们采用目的性抽样（purposive sampling）法，招募了一批面向8至16岁残障儿童的教育工作者。在2021年5月至9月的5个月周期内，我们通过线上半结构化访谈（semi-structured interviews）收集了30名教育专业人士的研究数据。我们的主题话语分析（thematic discourse analysis）识别出三大核心主题，用以阐释教育工作者如何感知并解读残障儿童的网络生活："堡垒与前沿"、"边界值守"与"接纳不适"。我们的分析揭示了教育工作者如何借助当下广为流传的"网络风险"二元叙事，将网络空间简化为安全（堡垒）与不安全（前沿）两类场域。这使得教育工作者常常将自身角色定位为限制儿童进入不安全网络空间的守护者。另有行动逻辑使得教育工作者能够将短期网络风险体验重构为体验式学习契机，以助力残障儿童在长期成长中构建并展现数字韧性（digital resilience）。最后我们通过分析阐明，教育工作者应借助数字韧性的视角接纳残障儿童日益深入的网络生活，转而成为探索引导者，而非单纯的限制性守护者。