MSI Press Blog

      São Paulo If one spends much time in Brazil, one ends up at some point in Sao Paolo. If one spends a little time in Brazil, it almost always includes Sao Paolo. As New York City is not the political capital of the USA but the cultural capital, so to is Sao Paolo not the political capital of Brazil but the cultural capital. Sao Paolo is where it is happening, as young folks today say.   Coals to New Castle When I taught task‑based learning in L2 at the University of São Paulo — a place shaped by Paulo Freire’s intellectual legacy — the instructors treated TBL as if it were a brand‑new, electrifying discovery. Their enthusiasm was genuine, but I couldn’t help feeling a bit bemused. Freire had been arguing for decades that learning should emerge from real life, real problems, real dialogue. In that context, TBL shouldn’t have felt radical at all. It wasn’t that the instructors were wrong; it was just that the excitement seemed oddly disconnected from the...

  Curritiba Curritiba was never on my original itinerary for workshops in Brazil, but when Areta and I met at a national meeting in Brasília, plans rearranged themselves almost instantly. She invited me to her institute in Curritiba—she was the director—and of course I said yes. I no longer remember the exact workshop topic; it must have been something connected to language teaching or what we then called “learning differences,” long before the vocabulary settled into today’s understanding of neurodiversity. What I do remember are the people, and I remember the town. The City My time in Curritiba was lovely. It was winter back home, but in Brazil it was a balmy summer. Ipês, jacarandás, and bougainvillea spilled color everywhere, and the air carried that soft, humid perfume that makes life feel unhurried. The whole city seemed wrapped in green—parks, tree-lined streets, gardens that looked tended by people who loved beauty as much as practicality. And the people matched the...

Campinas Campinas was a place that would become larger than life for me, though nothing about it announced that at first glance. On the surface, it was simply a prosperous inland Brazilian city—warm, sprawling, modern in some places and worn in others, with jacaranda trees spilling purple blossoms onto wide avenues, and a rhythm that felt both industrious and relaxed. It was a university town, a tech hub, an agricultural center, and a place where people lingered over coffee as if time were elastic. I arrived expecting an assignment. I left with a story. The flight from Los Angeles to São Paulo was uneventful in the best possible way—comfortable, quiet, and long enough to settle into the strange suspension of international travel. I was in the middle cabin, up front, exit row, aisle seat B, with more legroom than I deserved. In seat A, by the window, was a gentle, pleasant conversationalist who introduced himself as Eduardo Pereira. The hours gave us time to talk, and Eduardo—soft...