Active Teaching and Learning: Educational Trends and Practices

1. Introduction

Educational research published over the past five years reveals a sustained shift from content-delivery models toward learning ecologies that explicitly interweave place, subjectivity, and institutional responsibility. The nineteen articles included in this Special Issue offer a particularly compelling illustration of this paradigm shift. Despite their diversity in educational level, methodology, and sociocultural context, they share a common premise: improving learning outcomes depends as much on the cultural relevance of school experiences as on emotional support, student agency, and the capacity of institutions to safeguard the time and well-being of educators.

This Editorial provides an interpretive—rather than taxonomic—reading of these findings, structured around four interrelated dimensions: (i) entanglement with the sociocultural context, (ii) the psychoeducational dynamics specific to students, (iii) methodological and technological renewal, and (iv) the institutional conditions that either sustain or undermine educational innovation.

2. Sociocultural Rooting: When School Opens to the World

Some of the most compelling findings emerge from studies that translate local culture into pedagogical action. In this vein, the early literacy project developed by Zahedi and colleagues in a Mumbai preschool demonstrates that the reduction in reading risk—from 87% to 11% over five years—was only possible when curriculum design, spatial reconfiguration, and family involvement converged into a coherent framework. Similarly, according to Miseliūnaitė and Cibulskas, the reform of Lithuanian primary education underscores the value of alternating “transactional” active strategies (e.g., cooperative games) with “transformational” care practices, such as meditation and gardening, aimed at fostering holistic development beyond academic achievement.

Cultural relevance becomes more pronounced when schools integrate oral heritage and community identities. The epew, a traditional Mapuche tale in which protagonists feel and converse with nature, revealed to early childhood educators that incorporating Indigenous knowledge requires preserving orality rather than translating it into predefined Western formats, as shown by the findings of Riquelme Mella et al. The same principle is evident in Slovak primary education, as observed by Bočková and Rumanová: bringing geometry outdoors—drawing large-scale circles, measuring radii with ropes—encouraged conceptual clarification and strengthened students’ connection with their immediate environment. Even in secondary education, the embodied engagement with physical phenomena—through “thought journeys” and sequenced drawings—can foster emotions of curiosity and support the reconstruction of the concept of refraction, as evidenced in the research by Schur et al.

Taken together, these studies converge on the insight that education acquires greater depth when content engages with meaningful experiences beyond the classroom and when pedagogical practices are intentionally grounded in cultural context.

3. Psychoeducational Dynamics: Motivation, Self-Efficacy, and Self-Regulation

The second interpretive dimension centers on student subjectivity. The study by Sánchez-Bolívar et al., involving over one thousand Spanish university students, revealed the prominence of intrinsic motivation and its association with social competencies, such as empathy and assertiveness, particularly in Health Sciences. This finding complements the systematic review by Vaičiūnienė and Kazlauskienė on self-directed learning, which identifies “liberating factors”, such as teacher-conferred autonomy, abundant feedback, and a positive emotional climate, while highlighting overload and excessive control as “oppressive factors”.

In the domain of creative cognition, the meta-analysis by Herianto and colleagues confirms a positive, albeit moderate, correlation between self-efficacy and mathematical creativity; the effect nearly doubles when self-efficacy is perceived as validated by external evaluators, suggesting the relevance of social recognition in shaping self-perceptions of competence. Similarly, Koh and Kim demonstrate that the use of instant response systems (such as Socrative) in Hindi language classes shows particular benefits for average-performing students—arguably those with the greatest insecurity—who gain the most from immediate and anonymous feedback.

Playful motivation adds yet another layer. Ishak et al.’s review on digital game-based learning concludes that coherent narrative structures and challenge levels tailored to the player’s cognitive profile activate intrinsic motivation and enhance academic performance. Thus, three key indicators—interest, self-efficacy, and recognition—emerge as converging dimensions, whose alignment appears essential to sustaining student engagement and self-regulation.

4. Methodological and Technological Renewal: Playful Rigor and Digital Reflexivity

In the field of didactic praxis, research suggests that the key lies not in technological novelty per se but in its alignment with the principles of active learning. The “team question battles” implemented by Pujadas and Aidarov in Construction Engineering achieved a 100% recommendation rate for repetition, highlighting the synergy between playful competition and conceptual deepening. Comparable outcomes were reported by Roig et al. in team-based learning missions using Packet Tracer, where peer-assessment rubrics enhanced both technical performance and a sense of shared responsibility.

From this perspective, the live coding approach implemented by Masegosa and colleagues proved effective across diverse learning styles, provided it alternated demonstration sequences with micro-practice phases that allowed for reflection and immediate transfer. In a similar vein, Kilipiris and collaborators found that combining flipped classroom models with the metaverse was particularly effective for students oriented toward “skills development”, suggesting that immersive 3D environments enhance procedural understanding.

However, methodological intensity must be balanced with time management. A study on out-of-class workload in Architecture programs, conducted by Sirvent Pérez and colleagues, found an almost perfect correlation between hours of autonomous work and academic performance (r = 0.95), but it also warned of the risk of overload, especially for students with limited extracurricular availability. Rigor, therefore, is legitimized when it upholds the principle of academic sustainability.

5. Institutional Conditions and Professional Development: Enabling Change Without Eroding the Teacher

The viability of the aforementioned innovations ultimately depends on the structures surrounding the teaching profession. Valverde Pérez and colleagues identified a “coherence gap” in initial teacher education: while student teachers express adherence to constructivist principles, they often design activities that revert to transmissive logic—an indication of underlying epistemological and pedagogical shortcomings. This misalignment appears to be mitigated in the Israeli experience with hybrid heutagogy, where the negotiation of “boundary spaces”—both physical and virtual—enhanced student agency and fostered post-pandemic teacher reflection, according to the findings of Chamo and collaborators. Nevertheless, the study by Encabo Fernández and his team revealed that only half of future teachers were familiar with the Sustainable Development Goals and that literary reading—a potential gateway to these issues—holds a marginal place in curricular planning.

At the macro level, the “pressure map” applied by Berei and Kovács to a higher education faculty in Central and Eastern Europe showed that educators are responsible for training professionals to face administrative and performance demands that constrain their time for innovation and mentoring. This structural tension suggests that even the most effective methodologies are likely to fail if staffing policies and institutional incentives do not adequately safeguard pedagogical work.

6. Convergences and Future Directions

A joint reading of the nineteen contributions reveals four consistently interwoven vectors. First, cultural relevance emerges as a unifying thread: learning gains depth when it engages with narratives, spaces, and symbols that hold meaning for students. Second, a robust alliance between emotion and cognition becomes evident: the convergence of intrinsic motivation, socially recognized self-efficacy, and immediate feedback forms a solid psychoeducational tripod. Third, the interplay between playful rigor and temporal sustainability demonstrates that game-based, cooperative, and immersive learning environments can enhance engagement and skill development, provided that the workload remains within manageable bounds. Lastly, institutional care is confirmed as a precondition for innovation: without policies that value teaching and without training grounded in the epistemology of practice, the gap between transformative discourse and daily pedagogical action persists.

The final lesson is, therefore, twofold. Contemporary educational innovation rests on the interdependence of culturally situated practices, psycho-affective processes, and structures of professional care. Likewise, the success of any methodology cannot be assessed in isolation from the temporal and symbolic frameworks that sustain it. Institutions seeking to consolidate this wave of change must invest simultaneously in policies that safeguard teaching time, in mechanisms that ensure critical feedback, and in partnerships that link the classroom with the surrounding community. Only under these conditions can the democratic promise of education find a stable and transformative path forward.