Conference Program

Contemporary classrooms have become digitally mediated spaces in which digital technologies shape communication practices, structure information flows, and influence the narratives that emerge in everyday classroom interactions (Soriani, 2019). Within this environment, unplanned controversial moments are also frequently mediated by digital technologies, not necessarily as explicit topics of study but as conditions through which classroom polarisation emerges (Just, 2025; Van Alstein, 2019). Although the digital may appear to take centre stage in such situations, the tensions that surface are not reducible to technological questions alone. This paper examines how the digital becomes implicated in these moments and how teachers interpret and justify their decision to actively engage or distance themselves from it.

The analysis draws on a small number of illustrative cases from a wider qualitative study in which teachers reflected on why they chose to address unplanned controversial incidents. The digital dimension was not pre-specified in the original data collection but emerged naturally within teachers’ narratives. The focus here is on how these situations surfaced through digital environments, how teachers framed the challenges that followed and how they justified their decisions to act.

Across the cases, the digital appeared in distinct ways: as an object of epistemic debate when students questioned whether the internet could replace teachers; as a source and amplifier of cultural content and values in discussions of online influencers; as a contextual trigger surfacing latent prejudice during an online safety lesson; and as a relational medium through which peer conflict travelled across the boundary between online communication and school life. Teachers responded differently. Some treated these situations as pedagogical and moral opportunities for dialogue, critical scrutiny, and boundary setting, while others delegated responsibility to institutional structures. Teachers’ justifications drew on concerns including protecting students from harm, setting moral boundaries around discriminatory or exclusionary views, challenging prejudice and stereotyping, fostering critical and democratic engagement, and upholding the legitimacy and limits of professional responsibility.

The paper argues that while digital technologies can mediate the way controversial issues arise in classrooms, they do not fundamentally transform the decision teachers must make in the moment: whether to take up the issue directly or to limit their engagement with it. Rather, digitally mediated controversies reconfigure the context, visibility, and perceived jurisdiction of the issue, even as the fundamental decision teachers must make in the moment remains the same. Such a decision extends beyond the digital to include the teacher’s past and a desired future, unfolding in a specific context that is often emotionally charged. The teacher’s decision is also anchored in fundamental questions related to the purpose of education and who the person in teaching is (Cassar et al., 2023; Kelchtermans, 2009). The cases suggest that teachers’ decisions to address or delimit these issues are never neutral (Hess & McAvoy, 2015). They communicate implicit messages to students about what counts as legitimate knowledge, whose dignity is protected, how conflict is handled, and where professional responsibility begins and ends (Cooper Geller, 2020; Dabach, 2015).