Teaching work and being a teacher in Early Childhood Education

This work consists of an investigation into teaching work in the context of early childhood education. The study was guided by the cultural-historical perspective and its general objective was to identify and analyse the relationship between meaning and the senses of being a teacher in early childhood education. The study was carried out using a historical-dialectical materialist approach, in which the procedure used to produce the data was semi-structured interviews, in which four teachers from a CMEI Municipal Education Centre in Itumbiara-GO took part. The theoretical discussion sought to recover the category of work as a constituent of the human subject, and also addressed the paths surrounding the production of scientific knowledge and its relationship with the human constitution based on vital activity - in other words, work. The general categories proposed by Gyorgy Mark s (1974): universality, sociality, freedom, nature and the category of man's consciousness, were fundamental to analysing teaching work, while the concept of alienation discussed by Istv n M szaros helped us to understand this activity in the context of early childhood education.