Teachers of today face high demands for professionality and judgement in complicated issues such as fostering democratic citizens in a context where at the same time marketization and commodification of knowledge narrows the space for what education can be defined as. The prevailing transfer metaphor of knowledge where teachers constitute mere suppliers of pre-determined content and the learners become receivers of the same content may resound well with recent changes towards government by results, but it does not resound with many teachers’ experiences of what their profession, and professionality, involves. Factors such as how schools are organized, work reinforcement structures as well as narrow definitions of teaching work emphasize the practices of passing on subject matter to students. What thus is being neglected is the amount of, and nature of, work that involves setting the preconditions which allow or facilitate for such learning to occur. There is also a risk of teachers feeling pressed to disregard important pedagogical practices occurring alongside and beyond subject matter connected to school subjects such as those which aim at fostering democratic citizens.

By conceptualizing teaching in terms of building educational relations rather than transferring pieces of knowledge this paper puts relational practices in the centre and emphasizes the teacher’s professional concern for her students. It questions the view of the professional as detached and neutral and argues that concern for the other plays an important role in professional teachers’ actions. Such dimensions of teacher professionality, due to commonsense definitions of work, have been marginalized if not made invisible as well as undertheorized. Gender regimes which separate spheres of work and home silences aspects of work associated with femininity but through listening to teacher’s stories I will try to give voice to silenced expressions of professionality which appear in the relational practices of teaching.