Ensino remoto e saúde mental de professores: desafios, possibilidades e limites no contexto da educação superior

Abstract

Society has experienced transformations arising from a rapid movement of political, economic, technological, and environmental changes and, more precisely in the years 2020, 2021, and 2022, is facing intense changes resulting from the covid-19 pandemic. Areas such as health and education face great challenges, given the plurality involved in their constitutive processes and the complexity in dealing with the human being as their main object of investigation. The implementation of remote teaching, the main methodology used in education during the pandemic, has impacted the experiences of teachers and students, considering the changes resulting from a non-face-to-face teaching, the distance in interpersonal contact, and the development of activities for which we were not prepared. In view of this reality, this paper seeks to discuss the practices that result from this scenario, aiming to overcome the fragmented and biologizing view of the human being and the articulation between psychic development, mental health, social processes, and education. The general objective of the study was to analyze the relations between remote teaching, mental health, and teachers' work activities in the context of higher education in the light of Cultural-Historical Psychology. The secondary objectives were to identify, in the scientific literature, elements inherent to the use of digital technologies in education that contribute to the mental exhaustion and psychological suffering of teachers; to discuss the conditions related to the practice of remote teaching in public Higher Education Institutions; and to analyze the modifications in the work activity and its implications on the teacher's mental health. A bibliographic research of exploratory nature was carried out, whose proposal consisted in exposing and discussing scientific works already published about the mental suffering/illness of university professors and relating them to Cultural-Historical Psychology, contemplating authors such as: Vygotsky (1930, 2004, 2003, 2006, 2018, 2019, 2021), Zeigarnik (1979), Leontiev (1984, 2004), Martins (2004, 2010, 2011, 2019, 2020), Pino (2005), González Rey (2011, 2016) and others. Such referential favors the articulation between biological, social, and cultural aspects of human processes, in addition to enabling the displacement of the subject's sole responsibility for his or her psychological illness to a vision that involves public policies of care and promotion of worker health. The research involved a literature review that transcends the dimension of the epistemological assumptions of Cultural-Historical Psychology, entering the study of political aspects of the Brazilian public Higher Education. Based on the results, it is concluded that remote teaching, although it has contributed to the development of some work processes of the professor, has resulted in even more precarious teaching and work relations and in a higher rate of psychological suffering, when compared to the period before the covid-19 pandemic. Such findings are crossed by an educational context at the service of capital, in function of market interests and to the detriment of the quality of its processes.