What Has RIEH Been Teaching Us About Hybrid Education?

Research diary. Saturday, October 24, 2026

This Saturday morning was dedicated to adding the observations from our visit to the Hybrid Education Innovation Hub in the Federal District to the research map.

But before going any further, shall we take a look at two images? Observe them and consider what you see:

My intention here is not to discuss everything that can be read in the images above. When we compare the first records with today's map (the second image), the growth is clear. We started with three territories: the Observatory, the Maceió Hub, and the Arapiraca Hub. Now the map includes hubs from different regions of the country, connected by a dense web of relationships. We might even be impressed by how much the map has grown. What matters most, however, is not its size but what it allows us to see: the concept of hybrid education is being given new meaning in the practice of public school systems.

Resolution CNE/CEB No. 2/2024 defines hybrid education as the integration of in-person and non-in-person activities. This integration is mediated by teacher planning, supported by digital technologies, and aimed at expanding educational times and spaces. It is an important definition. In the territories, however, it does not arrive ready-made: it is interpreted, contested, and rebuilt. The research has been bringing significant elements to this interpretation.

In the first records, one tension already stood out: there was still no defined understanding of hybrid education. Many hubs were seen as recording studios, with cameras, lighting, and broadcast lessons. In this view, hybrid is reduced to equipment and remote delivery, a direct legacy of the pandemic period. This understanding persists and appears across several territories, alongside other constraints: infrastructure, counterpart commitments that are not always fulfilled, and hubs located in spaces with little visibility. These are the most rigid lines on the map, the things that persist and repeat.

As new territories were added to the map, now including the Federal District, which we visited last week, a different understanding began to take shape. In different school systems, the hub stops being merely a place for producing content and becomes a space for professional learning. We saw this on our first visit, at the Maceió Hub, and it gradually revealed itself in other hubs.

It is in this space, in the hubs, that teachers, school leaders, and coordinators come together, experiment, and plan together. The training of coordinators who then train other teachers, the development of local implementation plans, and the local adaptations of the national proposal all show a concept in motion. Hybrid education stops being a mode of delivery and becomes a way of organizing pedagogical work.

In some territories, there are signs of something more. Hybrid education begins to be understood as a way of inhabiting the school. This includes reconfiguring times and spaces, bringing the community closer, and creating continuous learning pathways. These are the most fragile lines on the map, but also the most promising, because they point to uses that no document anticipated.

What the research has been showing, therefore, is a shift:

- from hybrid as technology to hybrid as pedagogical practice;

- from hybrid as a blend of in-person and remote to hybrid as the expansion of times and spaces for learning;

- from the hub as a studio to the hub as a learning territory.

This shift is neither linear nor uniform. It coexists with resistance, with structures that weigh heavily, and with conceptions that still compete for space. This is precisely where RIEH makes its contribution: by requiring each school system to build its plan from its own context, it opens room for the concept of hybrid education to be reinvented from the ground up in Brazilian public schools.

The map, built using the cartographic method, has been our instrument for following this process. It is not meant to pin down a definition, but to perceive how that definition is transformed. With each new visit, our understanding grows.

Before concluding, I return to what I wrote here on the blog at the beginning of the month (10/06), in "When the map becomes larger than the territory: rethinking records in cartographic research". Today, as an alternative, I reorganized the map into frames using Miro itself... perhaps this is my own resistance to what the research is showing me, and so I try to put things into little boxes.

We keep mapping. And in this process, I, too, keep reinventing myself.