This essay seeks to contribute to building a methodological key to interpret the course and the current status of field education, a recent phenomenon in the Brazilian educational reality which has peasant social movements as its main actors. The article begins with an analysis of the original Field Education constitution, identifying its context, practices, and subjects. It then discusses the main tensions and contradictions in its course, particularly those that are produced in the relationship between the social movements and the State, in the affirmation of an emancipatory pedagogic tradition, and in the struggle for public policies that ensure peasant access to formal school education in their own territory. Finally, a few of the impasses and challenges that were singled out regarding the modern day Field education, relating them to the current global crisis of capitalism and to how it materializes itself in the issues related to work in the field.
field; work; education; social movements; public policy