The imperative of affect in early childhood education: the order of discourse of undergraduate education students

This article presents the results of a study that focused on the problematization of the discourses on teacher affect present in reports of an internship in early childhood education classes of 30 Education students nearing graduation. The aim of this paper is to discuss how discourses on affect become imperatives that invent and regulate the ways of teaching. The research was based on cultural studies and the studies developed by Michel Foucault. Its methodology consisted of Foucauldian discourse analysis, through which regularities and inflections found in the reports were highlighted. These reports were written using memory aids such as photos, plans, and other records of the students. The analysis evidenced the assumption of affection as a professional imperative associated with a process of gendering of teaching. From the research, it was concluded that the meanings of affect in the teaching profession only exist as unfinished results of processes that deal with naming it and shaping it. For this reason, if one assumes the perspective that the discourses that take affect as a teacher imperative, as the ones present in the reports analyzed, are produced by social practices, by the relations of power and type of disciplinary logic that operationalizes such discourses, it is possible to denaturalize them and reinvent them, experimenting with other ways of acting and thinking of teaching in early childhood education.

Early Childhood Education; Teacher affect; Discourse; Pedagogy