This paper presents results from a study - a doctoral thesis in Education Sciences - whose goal was to know the conceptions about childhood, scholar education and teachers’ professionality that are expressed in the field of initial education of teachers of the 1st cycle of basic education (1º CEB) - corresponding to the first four years of the scholar education - in the last thirty years. The study was developed on a network of relations of theoretical and empirical conceptions, which constitutes a map organized around conceptions about modernity and the subjectivities and sociabilities referred in the discourses that narrate it, with special emphasis on late modernity and its relations with childhood, the scholar institution and the teacher professionality, considering their crisis situation (see Pereira, 2007). The problematic that underpin the study considered that the teachers’ professionalisation is linked to a broader way of constructing modern states and a more specific way of schooling in childhood (see Nóvoa, 1987). The teachers’ professionalisation is embodied in a corpus of knowledge and a system of specific norms which have been administered mostly by initial teacher education institutions, and which embrace conceptions of childhood and of legitimate ways of educating children. Initial teacher education was set up as the social entity of the “manufacture of the professional teacher”, taken as a “moral enterprise” produced in the field of research and related to the intention of training a self-motivated child who is responsible and independent, driven by approaches in psychology and sociology, and by ideological pedagogical systems (see Popkewitz, 2002). The modern institutional programme (see Dubet, 2002) defined a mode of socialisation, a social process that transforms values and principles into action and into subjectivity, whose stability produced ideal types of individual and society. But late modernity is characterised by a destabilisation of the social conventions that support modern institutionalisation (see Giddens, 1997). This has a particularly disturbing effect on childhood, teacher professionality and school as an institution. This situation has faced teachers with new social and political mandates.

In methodological terms, the epistemological focus was the discursive handling of the crisis in modern childhood, teacher professionality and the school, in late modernity. The theoretical focus integrates several themes: modernity, institutionalization and subjectivation; late modernity and the crisis of the modern state and its policies; the epistemological field of childhood, schooling of children and discourses on education; the role of initial teacher education on childhood and on schooling configuration; and the social world, language, discourses and ways of living. The technical focus was the content analysis of biographical narratives from teachers, work experience reports from students in initial teachers’ education, study plans and their subject programmes of the initial teacher education curriculum. The morphological focus was the configuration and social mapping of narratives of childhood, schooling and teacher professionality in initial teacher education in the last thirty years. This social mapping was produced in terms of Paulston's (2000) conceptualization.

In terms of results we focus the presentation of teachers’ professionality narratives that has been configured: “the professional pedagogue”, “the professional under construction”, “the professional in crisis”, “the professional mediator”, and “the professional specialist”. Each of those narratives had a particular relationship with the narratives of childhood and of school education which informs us about the role of childhood in the teachers’ professionality configuration and the interrelations between the teachers’ crisis and the school crisis. We also focus the relevance of the teachers’ professionality narratives to understand the changes in the initial teachers’ education and its impact on teachers’ work.