As a way of guaranteeing the access to schooling to six-year-olds the extension of fundamental education to nine years introduces relevant questions into the current educational debate in Brazil. Departing from the conception of work as a historically situated and mediated activity, this article discusses how the implementation of nine-year fundamental education can impact the working conditions of teachers, and produce forms of educational interventions. By analyzing excerpts from interviews carried out with early childhood and/or fundamental education teachers, the text problematizes the adjustments and renormalizations conducted by the professionals when filling the gaps between the prescribed work, the actually realized work, and the real work, and deals with the individualization processes, with the weakening of collective work, with the amputation of the acting, and with the production of the instrumental deficit (as made explicit by the French ergonomics for the analysis of labor). As part of the tensions of the work, the comments from teachers reveal the impasses related to the way of dealing with the process of development of symbolic activities and written language, which are discussed in this article under a historical-cultural perspective. Thus, as an aspect of the knowledge that characterizes the work of the teacher, this article aims at giving foundation to the claims about the importance of making time and space for play inside the daily school routine, keeping in mind that the organization of educational proposals that effectively cater for the particularities and needs of six-year-olds is the basic condition to materialize the right to education prescribed by the proposal of extension of fundamental education.
Teacher work; Work prescribed, realized, and real; Cultural development; Symbolic activities; Nine-year fundamental education