The increasing cultural and demographic diversity among higher education students highlights the challenges regarding accessibility and inclusion. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the shift toward flexible, technology-based teaching practices. However, inclusive, and accessible pedagogical practices lack consistency, particularly when supporting students with disabilities or diverse learning needs. This study evaluates the effectiveness of the Learning Design for Flexible Education (FLeD) Tool—a web-based platform developed to support teachers in designing flexible and inclusive learning scenarios. The research adopts a qualitative approach, featuring semi-structured interviews with two Portuguese experts in accessibility and inclusion. The experts analyzed three learning scenarios designed using the FLeD Tool, through the lens of Universal Design for Learning standards. The collected dataset was analyzed using thematic analysis to identify common issues, strengths, and opportunities for improvement. The findings show a gap between institutional policies and their practical application, mainly due to inconsistent teacher training and technical limitations. While the FLeD Tool supports more flexible and inclusive pedagogical designs, experts have identified key shortcomings such as the lack of automated accessibility checks and limited support for specific disabilities. Despite the reduced number of participants (two experts) and dataset (three learning scenarios), which limits the study’s generalizability, the conclusions draw attention to the pivotal role of systematic teacher training, embedded accessibility features and solid institutional policies in bridging the gap between policy aspiration and effective inclusive practice.

Based on flipped learning, digital competence, and inclusive instructional design, this study employs a mixed-method approach (quantitative and qualitative) to evaluate the pilot and involves academics from six European universities. Teacher participants co-designed and implemented flexible learning scenarios using the FLeD tool, which integrates pedagogical patterns, scaffolding strategies, and playful features. Using a mixed-methods research approach, this study collected and analyzed data from 34 teachers and indirectly over 800 students. Results revealed enhanced student engagement, self-regulated learning, and pedagogical innovation. While educators reported increased awareness of inclusive teaching and benefited from collaborative design, challenges related to tool usability, time constraints, and the implementation of inclusivity also emerged. The findings support the effectiveness of structured digital tools in promoting pedagogical transformation in online, face-to-face, and hybrid learning. This study contributes to the discussion on the digitalization of higher education by illustrating how research-informed design can enable educators to develop engaging and flexible inclusive learning environments in line with the evolving needs of learners and the opportunities presented by technology.

RESUMO O artigo objetiva discutir práticas de ensino de ciências partindo de noções de vida e de natureza como contextos generativos, não idênticos às suas definições conceituais na biologia. A proposta é aproximar essas práticas do horizonte das epistemologias ecológicas (Steil; Carvalho, 2014), em que múltiplos e diferentes esforços compreensivos contemporâneos se aproximam, valorizando a materialidade da vida e criticando uma ciência humano-centrada, que tende a reduzir as múltiplas emergências do vivo. Toma em análise duas experiências, uma na educação básica e outra na educação universitária. Conclui pela produtividade para o ensino de ciências de voltar-se à condição do ‘estar vivo’, através de uma ‘educação da atenção’ (Ingold, 2015), multiplicando as formas de vida, à medida em que promove a percepção de mundos plurais, onde a existência se dá pela permanente coprodução da vida.

In an era marked by the increasing fragmentation of human relationships – where mechanisms of social and emotional connection often struggle to adapt to the acceleration of communicational technologies and digital ecosystems – Digital Media Art assumes a role of critical and sensitive mediation. The experimental and research-driven exploration of ways to reconfigure modes of being-with-others through technology fosters intersections between creative practices and other means, such as digital narrative and augmented reality, particularly given their immersive and interactive potential oriented toward ethical, social, and cultural concerns. These practices propose frameworks for listening, sharing and symbolic co-presence, where empathy is not conceived as a passive emotion, but as a relational process. This article offers a theoretical reflection on such frameworks, focusing on narrative portals activated through augmented reality, and analyses four contemporary international art projects (2021-2025) - Como Semillas en el Viento, Monumental Perspectives, Las Awichas and Augmented Landscapes of Empathy – which integrate technology and storytelling to cultivate affective and community-based connections. Through comparative analysis, this article aims to understand how these creative projects are situated within the field of Digital Media Art and how they configure spaces of relation and collective memory.

This article explores the disciplinary and thematic convergences of digital media art, urban life and social activism (in the digital plan), merging into a cohesive exploration of digital narratives and their role in supporting and boosting urban artivist networks. In fact, digital tools provide unique opportunities to broaden the scope and impact of socially-engaged art, primarily through artivist practices, while highlighting and emphasising inspiring existences and positions concerning urban rights and building citizenship. As such, in this exploratory essay, we seek to stress the importance of building counter-narratives from the grassroots based on ways of life, habits, customs and everyday experiences historically overlooked by dominant systems while at the same time building a theoretical-methodological framework to deconstruct urban strategies and practices and support different forms of self-representation. We will use two complementary dimensions to build our approach: (1) collecting, interpreting and processing data and (2) giving visibility to the referred alternative narratives. Regarding urban processes and physical spaces, these dimensions follow Lefebvre's structural thinking on the production of social space and the right to the city [1] [2], pointing out activist methodologies, e.g. those following principles of social justice, human rights, inclusion and equity, among others giving voice and space to the vulnerable individuals and communities.