Traversals of Temporality and Cartographies of Mental Health: The Bidirectionality of Care in Teaching

Abstract

This article aims to understand teaching in Early Childhood Education as a journey through the temporality of the educational space, taking the film Interstellar (2014), a significant work of science fiction, as a metaphor and analytical operator to reflect on teachers’ narratives about school daily life, the temporalities of teaching, affects, and the implications of this work for teachers’ mental health. This is a qualitative study, inspired by the cartographic approach, conducted through semi-structured interviews with ten teachers working in Early Childhood Education. The analysis of the empirical material was guided by discursive textual analysis, articulating the movements of unitarization, categorization, and communication, in dialogue with a poetic-reflective form of writing. The results show that teaching work is constituted in the interweaving of doing and feeling, revealing teaching time as relative and permeated by improvisations, affective bonds, and practices of care that are established in a bidirectional manner between teachers and children, sustaining learning processes, ways of remaining in the profession, and mental health processes in the daily life of Early Childhood Education. It is concluded that the cartography of narratives made it possible to map these journeys, affirming teaching in Early Childhood Education as an ethical and political practice and as a producer of meanings for care and teachers’ mental health.