Responsive Digital Pedagogy and the Social Sustainability of Digital Education: A Relational and Ecological Framework

Digital transformation has intensified questions about the sustainability of educational systems, yet sustainable digital education is often discussed in terms of technological capacity, access, efficiency and scalability. This conceptual article develops a distinct conceptualisation of responsive digital pedagogy (RDP) for the social sustainability of digital education. Drawing on scholarship on social sustainability, digital education, relational pedagogy, student agency and sociotechnical educational infrastructures, and informed by peer-reviewed research on responsive and democratic pedagogies, the article distinguishes sustainable educational provision from sustainable educational experience. It proposes four interconnected dimensions: relational sustainability, concerning recognition and pedagogical response; temporal sustainability, concerning attention and differentiated rhythms; participatory sustainability, concerning agency, plurality and meaningful influence; and infrastructural sustainability, concerning the technological and institutional conditions that organise educational possibility. These dimensions are examined through tensions between efficiency and attention, visibility and meaningful participation, scalability and relational density, and predictability and pedagogical openness. Socially sustainable digital education is therefore defined as the capacity of a digitally mediated educational ecology to maintain over time the relational, temporal, participatory and infrastructural conditions through which meaningful educational participation remains possible. The framework is presented as an analytical proposition for further empirical refinement rather than as a validated measurement model.