The social changes we have witnessed in recent years have introduced changes in the education system that were not expected by teachers who suddenly found themselves alone, teaching at a distance, from their private space and before their students who, more than ever, were unequal. Considering that the professional identity of the teacher is constructed by the feeling of belonging to a community, by the social practices of the subjects and by the articulation of the spheres of knowledge, of professional norms and values and of pedagogical knowledge, one can easily glimpse an enormous restlessness and anxiety, as well as the progressive awareness that their profession was going to be different and teaching as they knew it would not return.

In modern society, teachers and educators are the largest group of intellectual workers. In Portugal, PORDATA (2019 data) records 146,992 teachers and educators in pre-school, primary and secondary education, public and private, who then represented 5.66% of the Portuguese active population. Still, beyond their numerical weight, the importance of teachers' action derives from the fact that they constitute, within the influential middle class, what Bernstein calls "reproducers" (Bernstein, 1996). By posing the challenge of rethinking education and knowledge as global common goods, UNESCO (2015) assigns teachers and educators an active role as political subjects (Freire, 1985), who carry their beliefs, experiences, life stories into daily action (Goodson, Loveless & Stephens 2012), despite strong trends in training and public policies towards limiting teachers' action to managerial rationality and a technical and didactic dimension (Lima, 2016). In this context, the European educational sphere requires a redefinition of the teacher's capacity for agency, and this must be achieved by rethinking the role of the teacher as public intellectual in action in a world of tremendous tensions, characterised by the dialectics of the global and the local. 

According to Ball (2003), the new middle-class resorts to three class strategies which aim to perpetuate its social distinction, reproducing its advantages, mobility, and social progress, namely: the market, individualism and choice and competitiveness. It is indeed through its practices that the interests of this class are manifested, although the author points out that there are also divergences within it. Ball (2002) assumes performativity, a political technology of educational reform, to which the market and management capacity are added, as "a culture and a mode of regulation which uses criticism, comparisons and exhibitions as means of control, attrition and change" (p. 4). 

This work relies, therefore, on conceptions that assume identity not as attributed but as constructed, insofar as the division of the I as a subjective expression of social duality (Dubar, 1997) or of tensions (Santos, 1999) appears through the mechanisms of identification, which use the socially available categories, such as the professional class of teachers, because "it is, in fact, through and in the activity with others, implying a meaning, an objective and/or a justification, a need (... ), that the individual is identified and is led to accept or refuse the identifications he receives from others and institutions" (Dubar, 1997: 106). 

In this regard and following the work that has been developed (Estrela, Ricardo & Duarte, 2021; Estrela & Duarte,2022), it is relevant to look to teachers’ life and work to understand their trajectory and to analyze their professional processes regarding three dimensions of their professionalism: identity, professional knowledge, and professional learning. The aim of the research is to identify processes of change in teacher professionalism and to identify the trends in teachers’ professionalism at different stages of the career in Portugal.

This context of fluid times (Bauman, 2007) and successive crises – pandemic, economic, social, political, and educational regarding the lack of teachers in several European countries - led to changes in the understanding of what it is to be a teacher, as an educational actor with a specific knowledge and historically assigned functions, which gives him/her a certain identity. Based on the initial questions what are the processes of change in teachers’ professionalism and what trends can be identified?, an exploratory study was developed within the scope of a qualitative research, using narratives as a data collection technique and focus group. Assuming that educational change must be understood considering patterns and forces of change that provide different paths according to the historical and cultural reality of each region, country or even professional, educational policies are refracted whenever there is a change in level or actors, accepting that this refraction occurs even at the level of the classroom with each of the professionals who work in it. Teachers’ narratives are relevant in this context of individualized society, and a fundamental tool for understanding educational change, as they are assumed as a refraction of the educational history, as well as social, political and economic changes. This option seems consistent with the objectives indicated since it allows for the reconstruction of reality and a discursive practice that provides meaning to the experiences, facilitating the explicitness of what was lived, allowing the researcher to theorise what was lived and, also, the re-signification of the knowledge produced through what was experienced (Reis, 2008). The narratives were collected at three different moments - one at the beginning of the pandemic period, another one after the second confinement and the third last December, now without any restrictions in Portuguese schools due to the pandemic. Thus, between April and May 2020, 16 teachers participated, between November and December 2021, 21 teachers participated, and between December 2022 and January 2023, 31 teachers participated. The categories worked were emergent from the materials collected from the participants, having found regularities and singularities, whose dialogue around the theme allowed strengthening the interpretation and the meaning found in data collection (Rodrigues, N.C.& Prado, G.V.T., 2015). Based on the emerged categories, the narratives were completed with a focus group with nine teachers in initial training. This focus group lasted more than one hour and half and was video recorded.

Findings show there are two patterns of change in teachers’ professionalism: digitalization and parentocracy. These two forces influence the three professional dimensions considered in the study as they allow to see the teachers seem to become more technical and less political, with no space and time for reflexivity. Professional knowledge and learning are taken by the digital as technologies have assumed the centre of the classes. Nevertheless, trends also show teachers integrating social knowledge and enriching professional one as they have more than one professional occupation. Many come from other professions and would like to keep both. Although their lived trajectories point to a contradiction between the assumed professional objectives and the growing affirmation of the technical dimension, there is less ambivalence as teachers seem to be more convicted. Virtual identities reinforce the political technologies of educational reform such as performativity driven by technologies.

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