Experience and aesthetic rationality in teaching work

Abstract

Understanding teaching work as an experience, incorporate aesthetic rationality and self-care become conditions for its valorization. The weakening and precariousness of educational activities in contemporary society has caused anguish and disenchantment in many teachers and, given the current scenario, the following problem is elaborated to direct our discussion: What is the place of aesthetic experience in the context of teaching work? As objectives of this theoretical incursion, the concrete conditions of educational activities in neoliberal society are questioned, as they impede the experience and the construction of meaning for the subjects of these activities, and aesthetic rationality and self-care are proposed as foundations of the teaching profession.  giving it an artistic sense. The construction of the text followed the thinking of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, and an approximation of Michael de Foucault's ideas with these theorists, considering the concepts of experience, aesthetic rationality, self-care and aesthetics of existence. As a result of the discussion, it became evident that when rescuing aesthetic rationality in his work, the teacher can tone his professional performance, even in the face of a historical tendency in the capitalist society of devaluation of the teacher and the imposition of an instrumental rationality as a form of control that he himself ends up reproducing in his pedagogical practice. Self-care creates space to think about the need for the teacher to cultivate body and mental practices and exercises that lead him to create a particular style of being overcoming the limits of  thinking and the neoliberal bureaucratic practices, opening up possibilities for building a profession based on aesthetics experiences.