When the researcher's record comes to inhabit the territory

Logbook. October 5, 2026, 12:16 p.m. Cartographic notes on the visit to NIEHMS and hybrid education in motion

Today I received a message from the coordination team of the Innovation Center for Hybrid Education of Mato Grosso do Sul (NIEHMS). The video I recorded during my visit to the Center in August is now part of the state network's teacher education course. It is a short message addressed to basic education teachers in Mato Grosso do Sul, recorded in the Center's own studio, in front of the screen displaying the NIEHMS visual identity.

I could treat this news simply as a personal joy, and it is. But as a researcher who follows the Innovation Network for Hybrid Education (RIEH) from a cartographic perspective, it compels me to think in two intersecting directions: what happens when the researcher's record comes to inhabit the territory being researched, and what this small event reveals about the very hybrid education we are studying.

In the tradition of cartography as a method, Passos and Barros (2009) propose an inversion that I consider decisive for educational research: instead of knowing in order to transform, it is a matter of transforming in order to know. All research intervenes. Knowledge and action are not separate, and researcher and field produce each other. Neutrality is a methodological fiction; what exists is implication.

Intervention is not always planned. It can be intentional, when the researcher organizes a workshop, proposes a conversation circle, or returns data to the group. But it can also be spontaneous, when it arises from the encounter rather than from a script. That is what happened in Campo Grande. I was there to follow processes, talk with the team, and get to know the Center's practices and structure. In the middle of the visit came the invitation: to record a message for the network's teachers. It was not planned, and it was not part of any data collection instrument. And yet it may be one of the most powerful pieces of data the visit produced.

The invitation is also data to be analyzed, because from a cartographic standpoint, the invitation itself says a great deal. It reveals that the Center does not see the researcher merely as someone who observes and takes information away, but as someone who can compose with the network. It also reveals something about how NIEHMS understands teacher education: as a space open to multiple voices, built through dialogue, rather than a closed package.

Kastrup and Passos (2013) describe cartography as the construction of a common plane, in which researcher and participants no longer occupy rigid positions of subject and object. The video is the materialization of this common plane. It belongs neither to me nor to the Center alone; it exists because there was an encounter, and it now circulates in a place I do not control: the educational pathway of teachers I may never meet in person.

I don't know whether you notice it, dear reader, but hybrid education is happening right before our eyes. This is where the reflection on intervention meets the concept we are investigating. In our research, we adopt the definition of hybrid education found in Brazil's National Curriculum Guidelines for Upper Secondary Education (DCNEM):

hybrid education: the combination and/or integration of pedagogical activities, through in-person education in the physical school space and non-in-person education, mediated by teachers' planning and action, supported by digital information and communication technologies and online environments, aimed at innovation and the expansion of times and spaces in the educational process, with compatible curricular organization and planning. (Brasil, 2024, our translation)

Read quickly, this definition may suggest a simple sum: a bit of in-person, a bit of online. But what I saw at NIEHMS, and what this video materializes, shows that the hybrid is less a division of course hours and more a reconfiguration of presences. A talk recorded in person, in a physical studio, on a day in August, becomes a non-in-person presence in an online course, meeting teachers in other times, other places, other conditions of listening. The encounter of a single day unfolds into many possible encounters. This is precisely the "expansion of times and spaces" the normative text speaks of, only lived rather than merely prescribed.

There is yet another element of the definition that seems essential to me and that this case highlights: mediation through teachers' planning and action. The video did not end up in the course by chance. Someone on the Center's team decided that this message made sense for that particular course, placed it within a pathway, and gave it pedagogical intentionality. The hybrid is not the technology that records and transmits; it is the gesture of those who plan and articulate. Without that gesture, we would have nothing more than a video file.

What provokes me most, however, is realizing that hybrid education, as it takes shape in the Centers, begins to escape its instituted contours. Institutional analysis, which is in close dialogue with cartography, helps us think through this tension between the instituted, that which is already established and regulated, and the instituting, the forces that produce new forms (Lourau, 2004). The Ordinance that created RIEH, the National Digital Education Policy (PNED) law, and the DCNEM make up the instituted plane: they define, guide, and grant legitimacy. But what happens in the Centers does not fit entirely within the documents.

A studio inside a department of education, producing materials for teacher education, is already an expanded school, one that does not coincide with the building or the classroom. A researcher from another university, from another state, invited to speak directly to the teachers of a network that is not his own, blurs the boundaries between those who research, those who teach, and those who learn. Material recorded for one moment migrates to another use, takes on another function, is reappropriated. None of this was designed in advance, and all of it is hybrid education happening.

Perhaps this is the most important shift that cartography allows us to perceive: the concept of hybrid education is not merely being applied in the networks; it is being produced by them. The Centers are not only places where a policy is carried out; they are places where the concept itself gains density, new contours, lines of flight. Schlemmer, Morgado and Moreira (2020) speak of the inhabiting of teaching and learning in innovation ecosystems, and that is what I observe: the hybrid ceases to be a modality and becomes a way of inhabiting education, crossing physical and digital spaces, institutions, roles, and times.

Deleuze and Guattari (1995) distinguish the map from the tracing. For these authors, the tracing reproduces what is already given; the map is open, connectable, always susceptible to new entries. The researcher who makes a tracing leaves the field carrying a copy of what he saw. The cartographer knows that the very act of mapping alters what is being mapped.

Months after the visit, the territory has changed, and part of that change passes through me. This demands ethical and analytical attention. Ethical, because the researcher's presence produces effects that must be acknowledged and cared for. Analytical, because these effects are also research material: what does it mean for a public school network to incorporate into teacher education the voice of someone who follows it academically? What relationships between university, observatory, and school networks does this make visible? What new configurations of the hybrid emerge when research and teacher education become intertwined?

There is also a more personal dimension, which I do not wish to hide, because cartography does not hide it either. Taking part in building education means allowing oneself to be reinvented. When I accepted the invitation, I briefly left the position of the one who asks questions and took up the position of the one who speaks to teachers. And upon learning that this talk is now part of a teacher education course, I realize that I, too, have been displaced. Today I inhabit, in a non-in-person way, an educational space in Mato Grosso do Sul. I myself have become part of the hybrid I research.

This is perhaps the most important lesson of this stage of the visits to the Centers: the hybrid education we seek to understand is not made only with technologies, platforms, and well-equipped studios, although NIEHMS has them. It is made with encounters that expand times and spaces, with planning that gives meaning to what circulates, with the courage to open teacher education to other voices, and with the willingness of everyone, researchers included, to let themselves be transformed along the way.

I keep following, and being followed.

P.S.: behind-the-scenes photos on Instagram (@fernandoscpimentel)