Digital Education and E-Learning Innovations

Digital learning technologies have come to be central to secondary science education and, if they are to make an educational difference, school leadership must not simply put digital resources into teachers’ hands, but must also engage with deeply embedded inequities in access and participation in digital learning. Existing literature tends to focus on leadership, technology integration, science learning, and educational equity, which may be separate domains with little understanding of their interactions in practice. This study explores secondary science teachers’ experiences with leadership strategies that support digital learning and equitable science-learning opportunities for underrepresented students. A multi-site qualitative descriptive design was used with 20 purposively selected science teachers from five public secondary schools in Lynchburg, Virginia; each school had a single semi-structured focus group interview. Through reflexive thematic analysis, five themes emerged: distributed leadership as the professional influence, leadership support for digital science learning, technology as an amplifier of scientific inquiry, equity by design and perceived science-learning outcomes. Participants emphasized meaningful involvement in decision-making, science-specific professional support, reliable infrastructure, accessibility, and purposeful technology–pedagogy alignment. The study integrates leadership, enactment of digital science and equity in one coherent narrative, contributing to an interpretive understanding of learning and equity stewardship. The findings indicate that an impactful and fair digital transformation is driven less by the use of technology, and more by leadership that promotes quality of learning, accessibility, participation, and equitable science-learning opportunities.