The years following the approval of the Law of Guidelines and Bases for Education in Brazil in 1996 were prolific in changes in the field of teacher education, with an emphasis on in-service education. Since then, the arguments about the importance of teachers’ continuous professional updating as a requisite to face up to the transformations of contemporary society were overtaken by the discourse about the urgency of higher education for teachers, a level of training hitherto required only for high school teachers. Prominent among the policies adopted along these lines are those that promoted the multiplication of special programs – provisional courses created to be a short term response to the growing demand for higher education by teachers. For that, these programs were implemented through partnerships between the secretariats for education, major universities and private companies, as well as through the use of distance learning and Information and Communication Technologies. This scenario points to abrupt changes taking place in the field of teacher education in the country.

The present work aims at analyzing the model of in-service training that was disseminated in Brazil through these programs, here entitled model of pedagogical contemporaneity. Its objective is to identify the logics presiding over this model and the devices it uses to put these logics in practice, taking into account the creation of a market of education that underlies the expansion of the model. The model of pedagogical modernity under the primacy of visibility (Carvalho) is taken here as an analytical counterpoint. We argue that the model under study here is driven by the primacy of invisibility, sustained, on the one hand, by the fluidity of the institutions that put them in practice and, on the other, by the managerial logic that guides it based on principles of a rationalist-instrumental control. From a pedagogical point of view, invisibility is guaranteed by a set of practices that lead teachers to seek model references in themselves, by postulating the creation of the reflective teacher, of the teacher researcher, who must research and reflect about his/her own practices. Unlike modernity, in which the pedagogical model was external to the teacher, so that it could be seen and imitated, the model of contemporaneity is referred to the teacher him/herself. The teacher must look to him/herself in order to become a new teacher, through operations that aim at the (re)modeling of oneself. It is a model that is fluid at the level of pedagogical relations, but consistent within the sphere of macro-politics, since the managerial and control strategies and devices employed are structured and articulated to ensure an education as homogeneous as possible. A set of discourses, practices and devices put in place through special programs try to cope with the task of producing such new professional, tailored to live under the cultural consumption of the pedagogical contemporaneity, as shown by our studies. The research is grounded mainly in the works of Pierre Bourdieu.

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