A nucleus that is not a place.
A policy that is metabolized.
A writing that also researches.
In this entry, two concerns that have been with me for some time took on a sharper outline this week. I could not say exactly when they began. I only know that they grew denser amid readings, conversations, and a visit that, though not my first, made me see differently something I thought I already knew.
What, after all, is a Nucleus? This question ran through the entire first year of the research. It was present in the readings and in the on-site visits to about 40% of the Innovation Nuclei for Hybrid Education (NIEH) spread across Brazil. Some were fully operating, others still being set up or organizing their first activities. With each visit, the question returned by a different path.
At the beginning, I confess, I imagined the Nuclei as physical presences inside schools, spaces dedicated to promoting Hybrid Education there. It was a simple, almost architectural image: the Nucleus would be a room, a place, an address. And it was in the Nuclei, I thought, that everything should happen.
Last Wednesday, September 23, I returned to the first Nucleus ever installed, located on the campus of the Federal University of Alagoas (Ufal). It was created as a pilot, as a test, in the words of the coordinator of the Innovation Network for Hybrid Education (RIEH), Prof. Ibsen Bittencourt. This was not a visit to an unfamiliar place. I know this Nucleus well. I have taken part in several initiatives there that made full and genuine use of the possibilities it offers. Perhaps that is why I did not expect to be surprised.
But I was. That morning, something rearranged itself. The feeling that came over me was one of discovery, almost of illumination: a clarity of understanding I had not gone looking for, and that arrived without asking permission. While I was there, the other Nuclei I had visited over the year came back to me, one by one. Those that were fully functioning, and those still searching for their own way of functioning. And I began to perceive, concretely, something I had until then only sensed in my readings: the concept was materialized before me, but not in the walls. It was in the relationships that the space had made possible.
I left without the idea I had started the research with. I no longer think that everything needed to develop Hybrid Education must take place in the Nuclei. The Nucleus is not the place where Hybrid Education happens. It is something that makes it happen elsewhere.
That was when an analogy occurred to me, which I record here as a clue rather than a conclusion. In biology, the cell nucleus is not simply the place where things happen. It concentrates information, regulates processes, organizes activities, and takes part in the reproduction and transformation of the cell. I tried to systematize this comparison in the table below, adding a third column with the questions the analogy sends back to the field:
What moves me most in this image is that the cell nucleus does not produce the life of the cell on its own. It is part of an interdependent system. This helps me distrust a very common idea, one I may have carried myself at the start: the Nucleus as a center that radiates innovation, from the inside out and from the top down. Instead, I am beginning to think of it as an articulating node in a living network, whose existence depends on the relationships it establishes with schools, teachers, students, school leaders, universities, technologies, and public policies.
In this shift, "nucleus" no longer names a physical space or an administrative structure and comes to name a function: concentrating, articulating, producing, metabolizing, and disseminating knowledge and practices, in permanent exchange with the environment.
The word that stayed with me after the visit was metabolism. The Nucleus receives elements from policy, from research, from teachers' experiences, and from schools' demands. These elements are appropriated, transformed, and recombined in each context. What comes in does not necessarily go out the same. And this speaks directly to our choice to map the implementation of the RIEH cartographically. Perhaps we are not only following the "implementation" of a policy, but the way different territories metabolize it.
So I venture a provisional formulation. The NIEH can be understood, metaphorically, as nuclei of a living system of pedagogical innovation: spaces that concentrate knowledge and experiences, articulate people and processes, metabolize the guidelines of educational policies, and produce new possibilities for practice, always in interaction with the context in which they are embedded.
I also record a caveat: this is a heuristic analogy, not a direct transposition of concepts from biology to education. And I leave open what I still do not understand. In the Nuclei still being set up, is this "metabolism" already happening, or is there not yet anything to metabolize? And can a Nucleus exist before it has relationships?
How do we write what the field gives us? The second concern has to do with the very act of writing these reports. How do we record the data we produce, and how does writing take part in cartographic analysis?
To broaden this conversation, master's student Fernando Costa shared with the group Veronica Gurgel's article Pistas para a escrita de relatos cartográficos ("Clues for Writing Cartographic Reports," https://doi.org/10.12957/riae.2023.80649). Reading it made me look back at this blog and at the way we have been writing in it.
The author starts from an idea that, in cartography, we already know at the level of method but rarely apply to writing: we do not collect data, we produce it. If so, the field report is not the place where we deposit what we already knew. It is one of the places where the field emerges. Writing is also researching (Gurgel, 2023).
Some of the article's clues struck me in particular, because I recognize in them both what we already do and what we still lack.
a) The first is that a cartographic report is not a formal report. Date, place, and who was present are necessary, but not enough. The report must make room for the affects of the experience, for associations, for moments of strangeness. Nor is it an intimate diary or a hermetic text: it must be shareable. I reread some of our reports and noticed that we sometimes swing between these two poles.
b) The second is the idea of embodied writing, which the author draws from Vermersch: moving from the generic ("the Nuclei tend to...") to the concrete ("that day, in that room..."). Not out of fussiness about words, but because this shift brings us back into the experience. That is what I tried to do above, returning to the visit at Ufal before arriving at the metaphor.
c) The third is not trying to be exhaustive. A report can be organized around one moment that caught our attention, and giving it a title helps us discover which moment that was. A good report holds contradictions and enigmas. It can raise hypotheses, but without closing them too early into ready-made theoretical models. This makes me think that the cell nucleus metaphor must remain a question, and not become a frame into which we fit the field.
d) The fourth is polyphony. The report carries not only the voice of the one who writes it, but also the voices of others who lived the situation. On upcoming visits, I want to bring more of the words of Nucleus coordinators, teachers, and school leaders into these entries.
e) the clue of revision as seeing again: letting the text rest, rereading it as someone who does not know it, and above all sharing it with generous readers. Perhaps this blog is exactly that for us: a space where reports are read by the group, spark new questions, and come back to us transformed.
I close with a perception that only appeared as I was writing. There is a parallel between this week's two concerns. Just as the Nucleus metabolizes policy, the report metabolizes the field. What we experience on the visits does not reach the text the way it happened. And, if Gurgel is right, the one who writes does not come out the same either.
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