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When the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world in 2020 and into 2021, the entire system of education faced the most challenging task to provide education to students using virtual instruction. Within the United States specifically, the pandemic transformed teaching. Teachers were and have continued to be compelled to learn digital technology and integrate varied digital tools into their instruction. As guest editors, Eric and I had the opportunity to reflect on the many instructional challenges and valuable lessons learned about virtual teaching and learning in k-12 and higher education. One of the biggest lessons observed was exposure of huge equity gaps between the tech haves and have nots, regarding access to digital devices and reliable Wi-Fi. It was from this observation that the call for proposals of this special issue was developed. What does inclusion look like in the era of digital and virtual teaching?  With this in mind, we were tasked to coedit this special issue of JCSR focusing on the theme “Inclusive Curriculum in the Era of Digital & Virtual Learning.” We had the opportunity to review five exemplary articles responding to the theme.

Document-based history instruction (DBI) was implemented in a middle school special education setting to promote the development of disciplinary cognitive processing and higher order thinking using historical thinking as a framework for students with learning differences (ld). A convergent mixed methods action research design was utilized to explore a) how DBI influenced students’ disciplinary cognitive processing and higherorder thinking when reading multiple historical documents b) the affordances and constraints of using DBI in a special education classroom. Using quantitative data sources (e.g., highlighted documents, reading comprehension responses, and an ondemand writing task) and additional qualitative data (e.g., interviews, fieldnotes, classroom artifacts, and audio recordings), we uncovered insightful evidence to support the potential of DBI for students with ld. In one academic year, when reading multiple historical sources, students learned how to efficiently highlight content knowledge and academic vocabulary, interrogate historical sources, and corroborate information from different sources.

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