Caring Teacher Identity-in-Discourse, Practice, and Visual Representation: Elementary Teacher Candidates' Body Mapping During the COVID-10 Pandemic

Critically conscious care theories provide a framework for teacher candidates to name, analyze, and challenge structural injustice within and beyond the classroom during their teacher education. To support teacher candidates' enactment of such a critically conscious praxis in the postpandemic era, teacher educators must understand how teacher candidates during the COVID-19 pandemic adopted, appropriated, or resisted discourses of care that may enable or limit how they become critically caring teachers. This study examines how three elementary teacher candidates during the COVID-19 pandemic (co)constructed and (re) negotiated their identities as critically caring teachers through collaborative and individual body mapping exercises during online asynchronous coursework in the southeastern United States. The way that the participants drew and narrated their mapped bodies shows that participants positioned themselves in multiple, evolving, and sometimes conflicting ways in relation to the discourses of care across their education and work contexts and professional relationships. This study contributes to teacher education scholarship by shedding light on the affordances and challenges that discursive and semiotic tools like body mapping pose for teacher educators, who need to scaffold teacher candidates' understanding of care and rehearse pedagogical possibilities during emerging crises like the COVID-19 pandemic.