There is a particular humility in being invited somewhere as “the TPACK guy.” TPACK is the framework that Matt Koehler and I developed years ago, and it has since traveled farther and wider than either of us ever imagined… far enough, it turns out, to take me this summer to UNIJUÍ, the Regional University of Northwestern Rio Grande do Sul, in the small city of Ijuí in southern Brazil, for two weeks as a Fulbright Specialist. The project even had a lovely name: “Bridging Cultures with TPACK.”
But here is the thing about arriving as the TPACK guy. TPACK may be what opens the door, but once you are through it the conversation almost never stays there. Over those two weeks the talk widened, again and again, into all the other things that I have been interested in: creativity, design, the nature of teacher knowledge, and, inevitably these days, artificial intelligence. By the end, TPACK felt less like the subject of the visit than the doorway into it.
I have spoken / written elsewhere about the irony of being known for developing a Venn diagram, but I have to say learning about some of the projects that had happened in Ijui long before I visited was deeply affirming. That something Matt and I discussed on the 5th floor of Erickson Hall in East Lansing MI would become an innovative project (ProEdu) in southern Brazil was not something I could have ever imagined. It was wonderful to meet with the faculty who had led the project and the educators who had participated in it. As scholars we hope that our ideas travel widely and influence practice—to meet people who have been touched by your ideas is amazing.
That widening of the conversation was partially shaped by the three public talks I gave. The first, for an audience of teacher educators, made the case that teaching has always been an act of design, and asked what that means now that a technology has arrived that is at once astonishingly capable and deeply unreliable. The second, for faculty from across the university, widened the lens to the institution, using the pandemic as a reminder that education is designed at every level… what Melissa Warr and I have called the five spaces for design in education: artifacts, processes, experiences, systems, and culture. If AI is a disruption reaching into all five of those spaces at once, the real question is whether it happens to us or becomes an invitation to intentionally redesign. The third talk, for the broadest and most public audience, turned from analysis to practice: that the promise of these tools lies not in passive consumption but in active, generative, creative use. Design, redesign, and play.
This specific narrative arc emerged somewhat organically from both an internal imperative to not repeat myself (too much) and the different audiences I spoke to. At the end of the day, I think these they held together well, both individually and collectively.
I am sure somewhere in the Fulbright program’s vision is the idea that visits such as these will lead to further conversations beyond the original, pre-set agenda. And there were more than a few such serendipitous moments. One of the most critical ones was an email I received from Professor Fernando González, who had been present for my second (design) talk. In his email he professed some discomfort with the figure we had used to represent those five spaces… the nested ellipses seemed to imply a hierarchy he suspected we had not intended. But rather than simply disagreeing, he had gone off and built something of his own, a new figure that reworked our “domain model” into a “process model,” tracing how educational design actually unfolds over time. This led to a wonderful exchange of emails between us leading to both of us developing a more nuanced understanding of the role of design (where it happens and how it happens) in education. This was clearly not something I had anticipated but was a wonderful example of what happens when ideas and perspectives collide, transparently and with humility.
This exchange was not the only one. Fabiana and I fell into a running conversation of our own, about artificial intelligence and qualitative research, and about a methodological approach I have been developing. She was deeply concerned that using AI for analysis risked distancing the researcher from the data… that if you hand your interview transcripts to a machine to code and summarize, you quietly give up the slow, close, sometimes uncomfortable immersion in the material that is precisely where qualitative understanding comes from. This is something I have been struggling with as well (particularly in the analysis of the Silver Lining for Learning corpus or the interviews with cosmologists—two projects that I have written about).
And then there were the people, which is really what a visit like this is about. My host, Professor Fabiana Kurtz, who leads UNIJUÍ’s Mongaba research group on education, language, and technology, and a team of students: Fernanda, Daiana, Luciano, and so many others, who looked after me with a care that is hard to convey. There were meetings with the university’s leadership and its international relations office (my thanks to Vanderleia and her colleagues there), with school principals and teachers, and with Professor Sidinei Pithan da Silva and the faculty of the graduate program in education. On my last evening we held a session with students and faculty that genuinely stretched me. The questions were sharp, and Sidinei’s patient, philosophical thread in particular kept tugging the conversation somewhere deeper than I had planned to go. It was, in the best sense, tiring. The highlight though came at the start of the evening, when one of those students, Daiana, sang a song about friendship: a traditional song sung wearing a traditional dress.
Somewhere in there I also had a lovely conversation on UNIJUÍ’s radio, which they were kind enough to record and put online. You can watch it below.
I want to end with the part of the trip that had nothing to do with any lecture, because it may be the truest thing I can tell you about these two weeks. My journey home fell apart. Flights were cancelled, and I found myself stranded overnight in Porto Alegre with not a hotel room to be found anywhere in the city. (The reason as it turns out was a monster truck rally that was scheduled for the next day). Fabiana and her husband, Denilson, refused to give up, working the phones until they reached professor Sidinei’s sister, who simply opened her home to me, a complete stranger. A bed, a shower, a few hours of sleep before I set out again. I have thought about that a good deal since. You can measure a place by its universities and its ideas, and UNIJUÍ is rich in both. But you learn what people are really made of when your plans collapse at midnight in a city where you know no one at all.
So this is not, in the end, a report of a visit. It is a thank you. To Fabiana and Sidinei and Fernando, to Fernanda and Daiana and Luciano, to everyone at UNIJUÍ who gave me their time, their attention, their warmth, and, when it came to it, their spare room. My thanks, too, to the Fulbright Commission in Brazil, and especially to Patrícia Grijó and Vanessa Miranda, whose work quietly made the whole thing possible. And I have the strong sense that this is not the end of the conversation, but only the beginning of it.
Obrigado.