Mental Health of History Teachers: Post-Pandemic Impacts in School Contexts (2020–2023)

Authors

• Alessandra Nicodemos Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8287-9116
• Gilberto Lucio Russo de Oliveira Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro https://orcid.org/0009-0009-3010-711X

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17058/rea.34.20962

Keywords:

teacher mental health, history teaching, post-pandemic

Abstract

The article analyzes the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on the working conditions and mental health of History teachers in Basic Education between 2020 and 2023, taking the abrupt shift to emergency remote teaching as a central factor in intensifying inequalities and the precarization of teaching work. This qualitative and exploratory-descriptive study combines a literature review with empirical research conducted with twelve teachers who graduated from ProfHistória, seeking to understand how they experienced the pandemic and post-pandemic periods, how pedagogical practices were reconfigured, and what emotional and labor effects emerged. The results reveal overload, illness, and the blurring of boundaries between personal life and work, but also processes of learning, adaptation, and identity reconstruction, expressing a paradoxical resistance that sustains the school as a space of meaning and connection. The study concludes that teachers’ well-being depends on structural policies of valuation and support, and that History teaching, despite the contradictions intensified by the pandemic, continues to hold political and formative potency in defending a democratic and humanizing public education.