Conference Program

The feminisation of the teaching profession in Brazil cannot be separated from the processes of symbolic and material devaluation that have historically marked educational labour. The widespread figure of the tia (“aunt/auntie”), especially in primary schooling, has helped to naturalise teaching as an extension of care labour, weakening its professional standing and obscuring its epistemic and politico-pedagogical responsibility. This paper offers a theoretical rereading of Paulo Freire’s Professora sim, tia não: Cartas a quem ousa ensinar (1993), placing it in dialogue with scholarship on the feminisation of the magistério and with recent analyses of teacher-education policy in Brazil.

For analytical purposes, the argument distinguishes three ways of interpreting feminised teaching work: first, a vocational naturalisation that assimilates teaching to a maternal disposition; second, a technico-corporate professionalisation oriented towards institutional recognition yet not necessarily attuned to the political character of education; and third, a political-epistemic valorisation which, in Freire, takes the form of de-naturalising and de-familiarising the teaching role. The latter does not entail the ideologisation of schooling. Rather, it rests on an explicit acknowledgement of education’s non-neutrality and of the school’s formative function in shaping historical and critical subjects.

What Freire articulates within his specific context may serve, in light of subsequent developments in critical pedagogy, as a theoretical framework for reconsidering the public and epistemic dimensions of teaching more broadly.

Such a shift in perspective requires a reconstruction of teacher authority as a democratic practice grounded in intellectual discipline, continuing formation, and coherence between theory and practice. Politicisation, here not synonymous with partisan militancy, names the assumption of the ethical and public responsibility inherent in every educational act. In this sense, it restores to teaching the status of situated knowledge production and civic formation, resisting both the sentimental moralisation of care and the reduction of teaching to technical delivery.

The paper also briefly considers the normative transformations that have affected teacher education and curriculum regulation in Brazil over recent decades, asking to what extent these developments enable or constrain a reconfiguration of teaching work consistent with Freire’s horizon. Without offering a comprehensive policy review, it highlights how professional recognition remains entangled with gendered dynamics and with the epistemic definition of teachers’ roles within schooling institutions.

The paper concludes that the emancipatory potential of a predominantly female teaching body lies in its political-epistemic reconfiguration as a democratic practice capable of generating professional agency, critical authority, and informed participation in public life.