Workers in education and political construction of the teaching profession in Brazil

This paper examines the teaching profession in Brazil, based on the recognition that the growing professionalism in education is connected to the extension of school systems. Analyzing that the studies on the teaching profession come from different aspects (pedagogical, humanistic and sociologic) and from the development of these concepts and studies, the author shows the extent of the ambiguity problem between professionalism and proletarian mode in the constitution of professional identity. The paper highlights that the profession has been submitted to pressure and exchanges that are consequences of new regulations within the framework of the educational reforms of the 1990s, so that patterns of educational organization and school organization may be due to those changes as well as constituting a new profile of teachers, and a new identity. This work concludes by analyzing the impacts of those transformations in the professionalization of teaching, which can be the reason for a variation of two important faces of teaching: in relation to the object of work and with regard to work organization.