Affect, bodies, and embodiment of care: Elementary teacher candidates’ affective encounters with care through body maps

Abstract

This study uses affective perspectives on bodies to explore how elementary teacher candidates (TCs) learn about, practice, and embody care toward justice-oriented goals through their engagement in body-mapping activities. Data sources included the TCs’ body maps and their associated narratives in the context of COVID-19 in online asynchronous courses in the Southeastern U.S. The findings highlight how the TCs’ embodied knowledge informed their understanding and practice of care within and across relational, material, and socio-political contexts. The findings also highlight how body maps helped carve out reflexive, embodied, individual, and collaborative spaces for the TCs. The body maps helped the TCs to make sense of how teachers’ caring work is nested within material and discursive power structures and how such work affects, and is affected, by their bodies. These findings underscore the importance of preparing TCs to understand, negotiate, and resist ever-so-normative affect and bodies involved in care within the classroom and beyond.