Balestra, A. (2026). "Invisible Fragilities, Universal Design for Learning and Artificial Intelligence in the Post-Digital School". Open Journal of Humanities, 22: 87-106

In the post-digital school, invisible fragilities cannot be understood solely as individual student conditions, but rather as phenomena emerging from the interaction between learners, learning environments, assessment practices, technological devices and school organisation. From this perspective, educational design is called to anticipate barriers, rather than merely respond once they have appeared, by treating vulnerability not simply as a characteristic of the subject but also as a possible effect of the ordinary conditions of schooling. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) offers a pedagogical and design-oriented framework for rethinking inclusion in anticipatory terms. Providing multiple means of access to content, participation in activities and expression of learning shifts attention from subsequent accommodation to the construction of more flexible, accessible and responsive educational environments. Drawing on scholarship on UDL, educational reflections on emerging fragilities and recent work on the integration of artificial intelligence in education, the article examines the conditions under which inclusion can take shape as pedagogically grounded design and as transparent assessment practice. Within this framework, artificial intelligence appears as an ambivalent mediation. It can support accessibility, personalisation, formative feedback and multimodal representation; yet, when introduced without clear pedagogical intentionality, it may intensify standardisation, assessment opacity, technological dependency and new inequalities in access and participation. The discussion therefore identifies a set of conditions under which AI may serve genuinely inclusive purposes in school: explicit learning aims and assessment criteria, multiple routes for access and expression, human oversight in evaluative processes, protection of students’ agency, and coherence between educational aims, technological mediation and classroom practice. From this perspective, UDL is not treated as a technical solution, but as a critical framework through which invisible fragilities may also be read as signs of barriers generated by the ordinary devices of post-digital schooling, and through which the integration of artificial intelligence may be pedagogically oriented in an inclusive, reflective and non-reductively technicist direction.