🗓️ Wednesday 21 May 2025  🕚 11:00-12:00

• 🔵Theme: Evaluating the integration of learning spaces and digital technologies to support equitable and effective learning experiences

Sociomateriality and postdigitalism of online learning spaces: insights from the study on Polish autistic students’ experience with higher digital education during the COVID19 pandemic

Magda Rybaczuk & Clara O’Shea

Recording

Abstract

Autistic students are marginalized in higher education as demonstrated by lower degree admission and completion rates. Simultaneously, the digitalization of tertiary education has impacted their inclusion. However, few studies explore this topic. The existing studies on autism and digital education employ simplistic ontologies of autism, focusing on fixing perceived deficits instead of supporting diverse needs and academic strengths.

This qualitative study explored the experiences of seven Polish autistic students in higher education during the pandemic. It draws on Barad’s ontoepistemological philosophical framework, and hermeneutic phenomenology and Buddhist philosophy of knowledge as paradigms that offer unique insights into autism, postdigitalism, and sociomateriality of digital education. The data was generated via text-based semi-structured interviews and analysed with thematic analysis.

This talk presents the three key results around the theme of spaces. Firstly, the semantic range of the word remote is different in English and Polish. This impacted the participants’ expectations of online education. Secondly, the pandemic conditions merged the participants’ home, workplaces, and university resulting in both benefits and downsides. Benefits included reduced overstimulation and commute-related stress. Downsides involved the overlap of sociomaterial spaces, e.g. the clash of home and university life, and limitations of relaxation spaces. Thirdly, the entanglement of human and non-human agents transformed participants’ social identities. Participants gained or lost confidence, which impacted how they expressed themselves in lectures during and after the pandemic. The situation increased their self-awareness of autistic traits. However, their poor sense of belonging with peers remained unchanged.

These findings show the multifactorial nature of online spaces in education – as both barriers and an opportunity for inclusion, depending on the personal circumstances. For autistic students, these circumstances also include, but are not limited to, their autism. This study contributes to our understanding of better practices for inclusion of autistic students in digital education.