Teacher profession in the school institution: the historicity of the practices and professional cultures

Abstract

In this essay we present a subject-matter frequently faced in the educationalresearch field: the constitution of the teacher’s profession. A lot hasbeen written about this subject-matter, considering, for instance, therelation between work and class condition, gender and the professionalidentity constituted along the trajectory of the teacher’s life. Our aim isto stress the relevance of this research that tries to understand teachersin scholarly institutions by investigating the social practices put intopractice. By so doing, we emphasize the importance of the Marxisttheoretical-methodological approach, since it clarifies the historicalnessof professional practices. The reorientation in educational policies seemsto indicate a valorization of the teacher – ideology of professionalism – atthe same time that it contains the elements that will permit probing in theschool’s everyday life and the processes of alienated work. Simultaneouslywith the educational reform process, one can observe the production ofanalysis grounded in ‘post-modern’ concepts, orienting the understandingof the teacher’s work formation and the constitution of the teacher’sjob. Without trying to render account of the huge bibliography dealingwith those matters, we try to highlight the limits of these post-modernconcepts to understanding the teacher’s job, which seems to coincide withneo-liberal educational policy presuppositions. This coincidence, to ourunderstanding, only stresses the importance of Marxist categories for the research in education.