I return to the concept of hybrid education not to pin it down, but to follow it. In cartography, a concept is also a territory. It has borders, strata, zones of passage and lines that escape. What matters to the cartographer is not the definition itself, but what it sets in circulation, what it holds in, and what it lets leak out. Deleuze and Guattari (1992) remind us that concepts are not ready-made, waiting to be discovered. They are created, they have a history, and they have a becoming. This entry tries to map some of that becoming in the field in which we are immersed.
Resolution CNE/CEB No. 2, of November 13, 2024, which establishes the National Curriculum Guidelines for Upper Secondary Education in Brazil, draws the most visible line in this territory. It defines hybrid education as the combination and/or integration of pedagogical activities carried out in person, within the physical school space, and not in person. These activities are mediated by teachers' planning and action, supported by digital technologies and online environments, and aim at innovation and the expansion of times and spaces, with compatible curricular and planning organization (Brasil, 2024).
It is a hard line in the cartographic sense. It stabilizes, names, institutes, and comes to guide documents, plans and teacher education. Even so, when we look at it closely, it carries five elements that work as points of articulation on the map:
- the relationship between modalities, expressed as "combination and/or integration," which allows for both juxtaposition and organic articulation;
- the physical school as the territory of reference, since in-person activity is defined as what happens "within the physical school space";
- mediation by teachers' planning and action, perhaps the most distinctive element, which places the teacher at the axis of the assemblage;
- digital technologies as support, rather than as what defines the model;
- the purpose of innovation and the expansion of times and spaces, conditioned on curricular reorganization.
But let us be objective, clear and lucid: no concept arrives in an empty territory. In Brazil, hybrid education settled mainly on the framework of the Clayton Christensen Institute, as appropriated and disseminated by Bacich, Tanzi Neto and Trevisani (2015). For Horn and Staker (2015), blended learning is a formal program in which students learn at least in part online, with some element of student control over time, place, path and/or pace. They also learn at least in part in a supervised brick-and-mortar location away from home, and the modalities are connected to provide an integrated experience.
This stratum has its own lines of force and is very present in the literature, as well as in the practices and discourses we encounter during our visits to the Innovation Hubs. In this concept, the online component is a necessary condition. Student control over the path is a defining criterion, often delegated to adaptive platforms. The frame is that of disruptive innovation. Christensen, Horn and Staker (2013) go so far as to reserve the term "hybrid" for sustaining-innovation models, such as station rotation, lab rotation and the flipped classroom. They distinguish these from potentially disruptive models, which would tend to replace the traditional classroom. The hybrid thus appears as a transitional stage, with efficiency and scale operating as silent values.
Yet when we place the two maps side by side, we see that the resolution does not simply translate the North American framework. It deterritorializes it and reterritorializes it on different ground. We follow at least four movements. Let us look at them together…
The shift in control. In the disruptive framework, hybridity is defined by students' autonomy over their path. In the resolution, it is defined by teacher mediation. Autonomy does not disappear, but its source changes. It comes to be produced by pedagogical intentionality rather than transferred to technological systems. The teacher is no longer a replaceable part and becomes the very condition for the model's existence.
The opening of the non-in-person. There, the non-in-person is essentially the online. Here, it is everything that happens outside the physical school space, with digital support but not reduced to it. A zone opens in which the territory, the community and other social spaces can compose the educational experience, provided they are traversed by planning.
The change of purpose. The disruptive framework points toward personalization at scale and the transformation of the school model, often with expectations of cost reduction. The resolution points toward the expansion of times and spaces from the school. The hybrid does not replace the school; it expands it.
The entry of the curriculum. The resolution makes hybrid education conditional on compatible curricular organization. Hybridity becomes a matter of the pedagogical project, not merely an arrangement of delivery modes. This requirement has no direct parallel in Horn and Staker's definition, which is operational and classificatory.
There is also a terminological line. The choice of "hybrid education" rather than "hybrid teaching" (ensino híbrido) broadens the plane: it involves the educational process, school organization and the curriculum, not only the act of teaching.
The consequence? We can say that the map is not made of ruptures alone. Graham (2006) defines blended learning as the combination of face-to-face and computer-mediated instruction, a formulation broad enough to accommodate the Brazilian one, though without its emphasis on the teacher. Garrison and Kanuka (2004) speak of the thoughtful integration of face-to-face and online experiences and reject the idea of simply adding technology. This argument sits in close proximity to the resolution's requirement for planning. Hrastinski (2019) shows that the English-language field itself lacks consensus on what "blend" means. The resolution, therefore, does not stand against a single concept. It takes part in an open debate.
The most intense proximities, however, lie in the Portuguese-language field. Moran (2015) already conceived of hybrid education as a blend of spaces, times, methodologies, activities and profiles. Schlemmer, Morgado and Moreira (2020) understand it as an inhabiting of teaching and learning in multimodal, reticular spaces. The resolution seems to compose with this broadened understanding, without affiliating itself with the theory of disruption.
And how does this discussion "cut across" our research? Well, this tension is not merely theoretical. It lies in the very plane of constitution of the research we are conducting with the Observatory of the Innovation Network for Hybrid Education (RIEH).
First, there is a temporal gap that must be recorded. The Innovation Network for Hybrid Education was established by Ordinance No. 865 of November 2022. Its stated aim was to contribute to the implementation of the New Upper Secondary Education reform. The normative definition we adopt arrived only two years later, in November 2024. This means that many of the implementation plans, diagnoses and actions of the participating school systems were built before this hard line existed. They were woven with the concepts then available, largely drawn from the North American stratum and from the emergency experience of the pandemic. What we are following, therefore, is not the application of a ready-made concept. It is a territory in which different layers of meaning coexist, overlap and compete for space.
This redefines what to look for in the field. If we took the disruptive framework as our reference, we would look for platforms, personalized paths and student control. By adopting the resolution, cartographic attention must shift. We need to look at the intentionality of planning, teachers' action, the curricular reorganization of times and spaces, and the presence of the school as an anchoring point. The objectives we proposed, such as identifying how administrators and teachers implement hybrid pedagogical actions and relating digital transformation to pedagogical innovation in the innovation hubs, only make sense if we sustain this shift in our gaze.
There is also a movement that runs through us directly, and which this logbook cannot hide. In the project text itself, written in early 2025, we described hybrid education as a combination of "in-person and remote" teaching. That formulation is closer to the North American stratum than to the resolution we claim to adopt. In other words, we too had to revisit our own concepts. This is exactly what we have been presenting in recent entries: the cartographer is not outside the territory being mapped. The cartographer is affected by it, and the co-affection between researcher and field, which we set out in our methodology, also takes place on the plane of concepts. The same layers of meaning we find in the school systems are present in our own writing. Acknowledging this is not a flaw to be quietly corrected. It is research data.
This leads us to what may be a central clue: the appropriation of a concept does not happen at the moment of its publication. A resolution institutes a definition, but it does not, in the same gesture, institute the ways of thinking, planning and practicing that would give it body. Between the hard line of the norm and the daily life of school systems there is an interval. It is in this interval that the concept is read, translated, resisted, blended with earlier meanings and, little by little, inhabited.
Alvarez and Passos (2009) remind us that to map is to inhabit an existential territory, and inhabiting requires time to dwell. The same holds for those who appropriate a concept. Administrators and teachers do not exchange one understanding for another the way one replaces a document. They build, in process, a common plane in which the new definition comes to make sense in light of their realities of infrastructure, training and territory. The four gestures of the cartographer's attention described by Kastrup (2009) help us think about this process. First comes tracking, a broad sweep of the field. Then touch, when something catches our attention. Next, landing, when the gaze settles and the field reorganizes itself. Finally, attentive recognition, when what was seen in passing comes to be truly understood. The maturation of a concept seems to follow a similar path. First it is heard and repeated. Then it begins to provoke estrangement. Only then does it reorganize practices.
This has consequences for how we read the field. Finding formulations in the school systems close to "in-person and remote," or hybridity understood as platform use, should not be read as error or delay. It is the trace of a concept in motion, the coexistence of layers that are still settling. What we are interested in mapping are the points of passage: the moments when teachers' planning gains centrality, when the curriculum is touched, when the school ceases to be merely the site of in-person activity and becomes the point from which times and spaces expand. These points are lines of flight, small openings through which the normative definition begins to take on a life of its own.
Today we continue mapping and researching, knowing that the goals of the research cannot be entirely fixed in advance. As Passos and Barros (2009) remind us, the cartographic method reverses the direction of metá-hódos: it is the walking that traces its goals. Following the maturation of a concept demands the same respect for the time of the process. The point is not to measure how far school systems have already "adhered" to the definition, but to follow how it is being appropriated: at what rhythms, with what resistances, and with what inventions.
References
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BACICH, L.; TANZI NETO, A.; TREVISANI, F. M. (Orgs.). Ensino híbrido: personalização e tecnologia na educação. Porto Alegre: Penso, 2015.
BRASIL. Ministério da Educação. Portaria nº 865, de 8 de novembro de 2022. Institui a Rede de Inovação para a Educação Híbrida. Diário Oficial da União, Brasília, DF, 10 nov. 2022.
BRASIL. Conselho Nacional de Educação. Câmara de Educação Básica. Resolução CNE/CEB nº 2, de 13 de novembro de 2024. Institui as Diretrizes Curriculares Nacionais para o Ensino Médio. Diário Oficial da União, Brasília, DF, 14 nov. 2024.
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