The body, the care and the educational territory: reflections and experiences of teachers

Abstract

Caring involves a plurality of social factors, unites self-awareness and self-transformation, and achieves self-management for integration into the world. In education, caring must make the person aware of human frailty and lead him or her to freedom. Caring is an ethical and aesthetic concern for one's own life and the lives of others. In the case of teachers, caring arises from their personal and emotional willingness to become more involved with students who need support beyond the academic. Man, on the other hand, as a political animal, creates scenarios for action and expression. In this sense, territory is less extensive than intense: it is a physical and symbolic space, dynamic and relational, where historical-social relations are built through a creative process of desires and affections. A community view of caring raises the question: Are teachers' caring actions connected to each other and to others, or are they isolated and dependent on individual initiative? Therefore, the objective of this study was to understand the conceptions of body care derived from the COVID-19 pandemic among teachers from three Colombian faculties of education through the narratives that shaped their educational territories. Ontological-political hermeneutics was used as a method of analysis and the narrative interview as a data collection tool. In conclusion, according to several authors, the denial of the experience of care, in which people can share a bodily experience, leads to the repression of one's own feelings in extreme situations, makes invisible the decision to set personal limits, and shows how the body itself wants to come into contact with another, becoming a passive recipient of their pain, emotions and hopes.