Cartography as a bridge

It's Friday, and today I bring this week's reflections to this research diary.

This week, one element was very present in my reflections: cartography as a bridge. It did not emerge from the visits to the centers, but from supervision meetings, and it ended up bringing me back to the heart of the project: what we mean by hybrid education.

While one of the doctoral students I supervise is visiting the Innovation Centers for Hybrid Education (last week she was in Palmas and this week she is in Natal), I stayed here. I used these days to follow the reports coming in from the visits, read texts in progress, meet with my advisees, and discuss with them the directions of their research.

It might seem that the project's cartography had been put on hold. It had not. Cartographing does not happen only when we are physically in the field; it also happens in following processes, in conversations, in what affects and displaces us. This time, the field reached me through the voices and writing of those who research alongside me.

In the meetings, I began to notice something that kept recurring in different ways: cartography has also been serving as a bridge to other methodologies. It does not lock research into a single design; it opens passages.

The cartographic stance asks us to follow processes rather than represent objects. It calls for attention to what emerges and accepts that goals are traced along the way, as Passos and Barros (2009) point out. By mapping the field, researchers begin to see what else they need in order to understand it.

Sometimes, the initial mapping calls for an in-depth look at a specific case. At other times, the field diary records call for a more systematic textual analysis, supported by software such as Iramuteq or Atlas.ti. There are also situations in which the need to dimension the phenomenon leads to quantitative data, composing a mixed-methods design.

A bridge is neither a place of arrival nor a place to stay. It connects banks and allows us to cross. Cartography neither replaces other methodologies nor is replaced by them: it creates connections, in a rhizomatic movement, as Deleuze and Guattari (1995) conceived it.

This reminds us that methodology is never the first step! There is something I need to emphasize, because it comes up often in supervision: choosing a methodology is never the first step. One does not begin a research project by saying "I'm going to do a cartography", "I'm going to do a case study", or "I'm going to administer a questionnaire".

In research, we always start from a restlessness with reality. Something bothers us, intrigues us, does not fit. It is from this restlessness that problematization is born: the work of turning discomfort into a question, situating it, and recognizing what is already known and what still needs to be understood.

Only then does methodology make sense, as a path consistent with what we seek to understand. Cartography reverses the logic of metá-hódos and proposes the primacy of walking. But this reversal does not authorize starting with the method; on the contrary, it reinforces that the path is only traced from the encounter with a reality that questions us.

Perhaps that is why cartography works so well as a bridge. When research is born from genuine restlessness, the problem itself points to the necessary passages, and the method stops being a straitjacket and becomes a way of following.

It was at this point that the reflection led me back to the object of the project. Thinking of cartography as a bridge has helped me better understand the very concept of hybrid education and the way it materializes in the school systems.

In the project, we adopted the definition from the Brazilian National Curriculum Guidelines for Upper Secondary Education (Resolution CNE/CEB No. 2/2024): the combination and/or integration of in-person and non-in-person activities, mediated by teacher planning and action, aiming at innovation and the expansion of times and spaces. The word that challenges me most there is integration.

There is a recurring, and mistaken, reading that understands the hybrid as a sum: an in-person part plus an online part. Just as cartography is not a juxtaposition of methods, hybrid education is not a juxtaposition of modalities. The hybrid happens in the passage, in the articulation, in the flow between times and spaces that mutually affect one another.

The cartographic gaze also reveals that hybrid education does not materialize as a ready-made model to be applied. It is made in process, in a singular way in each school system. In the centers, it is possible to perceive the rigid lines (regulations, infrastructure, connectivity), the supple lines (the adaptations that administrators and teachers keep creating), and the lines of flight (practices that invent other ways of teaching and learning).

And there is something almost metalinguistic about this week. The research itself is happening in a hybrid way: the doctoral student in person at the centers, me following from Maceió, the field diaries circulating in digital environments, the meetings alternating between room and screen. It is not the sum of these spaces that produces the research, but the bridge between them.

This reflection also sheds light on the design of the RIEH (Innovation Network for Hybrid Education) cartography project. From the outset, we adopted a mixed-methods approach, articulating the qualitative follow-up of processes with the indicators gathered by the Observatory. There, cartography was already operating as a bridge between what is measured and what is lived, in a way analogous to what the hybrid proposes between the in-person and the non-in-person.

The visits to Palmas and Natal reinforce this. Each center builds its hybrid education plan from its own context, and no predefined script could account for this multiplicity. What the doctoral student brings back keeps calling for new readings and, at times, new tools of analysis.

The bridge, after all, does not connect only methodologies. It connects people: advisor and advisees, university and public school systems, those who are in the field and those who follow from a distance. Next week, with her return from Natal, we will keep reading the field diaries together and redrawing the maps.

And you, who also do research or live hybrid education in everyday school life: what bridges have been possible along your path?