In this paper, we present a part of a project, focusing on the task of teachers in Swedish pre-school and compulsory school, related to historical tradition and gender order of society. The aim of the study is to analyse how the tasks of school and pre-school are expressed in a) different types of texts, such as advisory documents and union journals, b) structural factors, such as distribution of resources of money and time, as conditions framing daily activities in school and pre-school, c) how teachers in pre-school and compulsory school describe and evaluate their work. The chosen method is a multiple case study divided into three different parts, each of them focusing on different aspects. These will probably be impossible to fully keep apart in the concrete work, but will intertwine because we allowed preliminary analysis to lead us to further investigations. The following questions are constructed as a beginning: What are the real conditions and frames like for the teacher's practice and how do they influence the daily routine? How do pre-school teachers look upon their assignments and what possibilities do they see for caring within their practice? Is professionalism only seen from a learning perspective? Does professionalism mean that caring within pre-school becomes invisible and the invisible caring in schools disappears completely? Is this an expression for a "paradoxically masculine" practice, in other words, a marginalisation of content and competence? The first part was done by analysing texts from the Union Press. Two papers were chosen. In each all leading article as well as letters to the press during ten years (1990 - 2000) were examined. The results show that words concerning learning increase in the leading article when the new curricula are implemented in both school and pre-school. The same pattern does not show in letters to the press. Here are more words concerning caring appearing or at least the same amount as learning. This was presented in Hamburg 2003. In this paper, we present preliminary results from the third study in the project, dealing with how teachers in pre-school and compulsory school describe and value their work. The results are based on repeated interviews with three teacher teams, used to create mind-maps as a way to present how they describe their work, content as well as goals, and on repeated observations in their daily work context. Both of us participated in the interviews; while one of us was carrying on the interview, the other made notes of key words and concepts coming up and also presented summaries of those to the team. Based on those notes, and on tape recordings of the interviews, we constructed mind-maps, one for each team. Those mind-maps were presented to the teams for comments and completions at the next interview. In this paper, we present those mindmaps, which show great similarities but also differences in how teachers´ work is described in the different contexts. They give a description of teachers' numerous tasks, on one hand in organising and planning work, often together with other people within and outside their own context, and on the other hand, in creating goals and content in their direct work with the children.