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As society has gotten increasingly digitalized, schools have made extensive efforts to accommodate to that development. With the digitalization of school, the special education practice and the roles of special education needs coordinators (SENCOs) and special education teachers (SETs) change. However, there is a lack of research examining this transformation, a gap which this exploratory study opens up for new understandings of. This mixed method study explores the special education practice in a municipality in Sweden, one of the most digitalized countries in the world. The findings show that SENCOs and SETs have highly positive beliefs about digital tools in special education, but at the same time their frequency of use varies greatly. Also, the study identifies special educational activities engaging with digital technology, describing a work practice with complex expectations of the special education professionals also in the area of digital teaching and learning. Furthermore, the competencies considered as necessary for handling the expectations are discussed.

Two educational trends that have had major impacts on school policies of the last few decades are inclusive education and digitalisation. To that end, the purpose of this study is to examine how inclusive education and the digitalisation of education are related, understood, and represented in one case of Swedish special education practice. Using activity theory as a theoretical framework, the results of this study suggest that the meaning of inclusive education has shifted, and that digitalisation has entailed both congruencies and contradictions in special education activities aiming for inclusive education. Although digitalisation was described as providing alternatives for inclusive school practices, new expectations and work assignments sometimes exceeded the special educators' professional knowledge.

This study explores how digitalization in school changes common work activities of special educators. Drawing on nine in-depth interviews with Swedish special educators framed by local digitalization policy incentives, the results of this study indicate that school digitalization has brought expanded work responsibilities for special educators and that these responsibilities require not only traditional special educational expertise but also advanced and critical knowledge about digital technology. With a cultural-historical activity theoretical approach, the study reveals contradictions and relations that provide insights into the complex interplay between special educators, technology, other actors in the activity, and learning objectives. The study contributes knowledge about the extensiveness and complexity of special educators’ work in increasingly digitalized schools. Based on the findings, it is recommended that the identified changes in work tasks and responsibilities need to be recognized, supported, and trained for if the potential of technology is to be realized more widely in general and special education. To ensure thoughtful and strategic digital integration in special education, the study results can guide initiatives to strengthen the complex knowledge that combines traditional special education knowledge with knowledge about technology’s abilities and inabilities to reduce learning barriers for student diversities.