Crystallising a Socio-Emotional Platform for Inclusion Within Innovative Learning Environments: A Diffractive Inquiry

Innovative Learning Environments (ILEs) are often promoted as inherently inclusive, yet their socio-emotional assemblages remain under-theorised. Drawing on a diffractive methodology, this study advances a socio-emotional platform for inclusion in ILEs, examining how emotions, relationships, concepts, and material arrangements intra-act to shape in/exclusion. A two-round modified Delphi study with 25 academic experts across nine countries was conducted and read diffractively alongside relevant scholarship. Analysis traces how bodies, affects, practices, and artefacts assemble within ILEs, revealing five interdependent socio-emotional dimensions, such as belonging, empathy, fairness, safety, and wellbeing. Findings indicate that these dimensions operate not as individual traits or discrete design features, but as distributed capacities unfolding across people, spaces, pedagogies, and civic practices. Inclusion is thus reconceptualised as an ongoing, care-based practice of collective becoming rather than a fixed property of environments. The resulting socio-emotional platform is presented as a relational, diagrammatic resource that remains open to contextual variation and responsive to entanglements of culture, belief, and gender. It offers designers, educators, and policymakers a flexible framework for attuning spatial, pedagogical, digital, and civic decisions to affective currents, supporting the continual reworking of ILEs as fluid ecologies for equitable participation and learner growth.