1 Introduction

Despite the importance of teaching for emancipatory education, in Brazil, historically, this area is marked by several challenges. ^{Gatti (2017)} confirms that student learning is built on the work of teachers, which, in turn, is closely connected to teacher training. However, Brazilian education has always faced obstacles in teachers' work and training standards, which do not sufficiently train them to meet new pedagogical demands.

Teacher professionalization is one of the essential measures for achieving quality education. However, several contradictions prevent the implementation of this vital political movement for the efficiency of teachers and educational institutions. Inadequacy of public schools, commercialization of education, and privatization are just some of the inconsistencies (^{Tardif, 2013}). The setbacks are not limited to teachers but affect students, as is the case with vulnerabilities in access to Digital Information Technologies (DIT) and other teaching resources, as well as failure to assist students with particular education needs and inclusive education.

Although emergency remote teaching (ERT) has proven to be a viable strategy to minimize the damage caused by the halt of in-person classes during the COVID-19 pandemic, the digital exclusion of students and teachers has become even more evident (^{Neves; Fialho; Machado, 2021}; ^{Neves; Valdegil; Sabino, 2021}). Throughout the educational system, the dilemmas of teaching work have intensified with multidirectional consequences, such as the physical, mental, and emotional illness of teachers related to the reformulation and increase in work demands (^{Fialho; Neves, 2022}).

Regarding teachers, the precariousness isn't homogeneous, substitute teachers, due to job instability and low salaries, experience more degrading conditions (^{Silva; Maia Filho; Rabelo, 2020}). As for students, on a harmful scale, students with a disability, such as intellectual disability, were more impacted (^{Mendonça; Viana; Nascimento, 2023}).

From this perspective, the question that arises is: what are the most resounding themes in Brazilian studies on teaching work? In search of answers, a bibliometric study was carried out with the main objective of understanding the central discussions in the Brazilian scientific research about teaching work.

Research on teaching work attracts the attention of scientists interested in understanding the various dimensions of the educational phenomenon, such as those relating to initial and continued training and teachers' professionalization (^{Fialho; Sousa; Nascimento, 2020}). Usually, studies in this area collect a significant number of citations (^{Nascimento, 2020}), which indicates its relevance for the scientific community, since it is a subject that is not limited to specific discussions but requires in-depth reflections on permanent monitoring of the outlines present in teaching.

Furthermore, advances and setbacks in education are an integral part of the struggles for those committed to quality education (^{Ferreira; Aragão; Andrade, 2019}). Considerations like these are essential, given that teaching work involves a series of elements that must be at the center of academic, scientific, and social debate (^{Araújo; Rodrigues; Aragão, 2017}) promoted by intellectuals and teachers in a battle together with their organizations, like unions (^{Assis et al., 2022}).

Within the scope of this work, therefore, the findings of the bibliometric survey are presented and discussed beyond the quantitative aspects. We argue, in confluence with current literature, about the variants that historically influence teaching work in Brazil, highlighting the low social effectiveness of certain educational policies, especially in light of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The text is organized into five segments. The introduction contextualizes the theme and specifies the problem, objective, and relevance of the study. The methodology details the research path in compliance with the bibliometric method. Discussions and results synthesize the evidence and analyze it. The final considerations return to the research problem and the main results, expose the authorial inferences and research limitations, in addition to suggesting future studies.

2 Methodology

This study is exploratory-descriptive and based on the bibliometric method, which used the VOSviewer®, version 1.6.18, to establish keyword co-occurrence maps according to the annual average of publications and thematic similarities.

VOSviewer® is a tool for publications networks, researchers, countries, keywords, and research institutions, which allows visualization and interpretation (^{van Eck; Waltman, 2022}). Bibliometric research, through quantitative evaluative techniques, reveals the state of the art of certain fields of knowledge and issues bibliographic reports on the progress of scientific production (^{Vianna; Pinto, 2017}).

Exploratory studies allow greater familiarity with the research problem, clarifying it. Descriptive ones, as the name suggests, describe the characteristics of the phenomenon in question and establish the association between its variables. In this way, researchers focusing on practical action usually develop studies that are simultaneously exploratory and descriptive. (^{Gil, 2008}).

The investigation followed the following steps: a) defining the research topic; b) choosing of database to obtain data; c) designation of the searched term and requirements; d) demarcation of eligibility criteria; e) exporting the file containing the metadata to the bibliometric program; f) submission of the records to VOSviewer®; g) full reading of the referenced texts; and h) interpretation and presentation of results.

The records were extracted from the main Web of Science (WoS) collection on September 8, 2023, using the term “teaching work” applied to the field topic, which corresponds to titles, abstracts, and keywords. The predilection for WoS was based on the quality and scope of the scientific production that it disseminates worldwide.

The inclusion criteria were articles published from 2008 until September 8, 2023; and at least one author affiliated with a Brazilian institution, even if co-authored with other countries. Documents other than articles or those that none of the authors were connected to Brazil were excluded. This step was optimized with the refinements: “countries/regions: Brazil” and “document type: article, conference article and review article”.

A file with a personalized selection of all metadata available in WoS was exported and processed in VOSviewer®, available at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10028511 ¹.

The most recurrent keywords, grouped in clusters due to thematic proximity, contributed to identifying the main thematic axes that permeate the production examined, whose synthesis of evidence appears in the next section.

3 Results and discussion

Initially, the search yielded 921 records, but, as the investigative interest was only in articles by Brazilian authors, the filters described in the methodology were applied, which resulted in 286 documents: articles (n=278), conference articles (n=4), and review article (n=4).

Five countries established co-authorship with Brazil: Canada (one article), Switzerland (one article), Portugal (two articles), United States (two articles) and Chile (two articles).

The Brazilian-Canadian study highlighted how the academic agenda affects professors in a Brazilian postgraduate program at a federal university, in which women were the most affected. The follow-up with students decreased and there was a low production of research and publications, in addition to burnout (^{Borsoi; Pereira, 2013}). ^{Bandeira and Marques (2023)}, in a partnership between Brazil and the United States, focused on participatory planning as a form of more effective and collaborative practice to solve problems that affect professors.

The recent transformations in teaching work due to the massive use of DIT attracted the attention of ^{Zani, Bueno, and Dolz (2020)}, who, linked to Brazilian and Swiss institutions, realized that it was urgent to train teachers to mitigate the precariousness of labor relations, such as the uberization. ^{Neves, Fialho, and Machado (2021)} explain that uberization is a phenomenon analogous to how the private transport app Uber operates, in which teachers are compelled to buy their work tools without due compensation, which results in the expropriation of their resources.

Regarding the temporal distribution of production, the oldest article was published in 2008 (n=1), followed by a variable production of one to four texts until 2017 (n=4), with gaps in 2014 and 2016. As of 2018 (n=44), production remained high and without breaks, but there was a small decrease in 2019 (n=40). See Graph 1 below:

Source: Authors’ elaboration based on research data (2023).

Graph 1 Annual number of Brazilian articles about teaching work at WoS 

The temporality of the production examined shows that the configurations that permeate teaching work in Brazil have long attracted investigative interest. The oldest work, by ^{Monteiro and Bueno (2008)}, sought to understand the knowledge and practices of literacy teachers in the decades from 1950 to 1980, in which the dedication of teachers was fundamental to the results of the literacy process.

Regardless of the productivity seen in Graph 1 reflecting only the WoS base scenario, it is suggested that the greater expressiveness of publications, starting from 2018, comes from the greater number of Brazilian periodicals that became part of the WoS, the thematic dossiers and the growing interest of scientists from different fields of knowledge within teaching work.

Incidentally, interest in teaching work is shared by 11 categories registered in WoS. The highest figures are for “Education Educational Research” (n=180), “Humanities Multidisciplinary” (n=35), “Social Sciences Interdisciplinary” (n=15), “Language Linguistic” (n=12), and “Public Environmental Occupational Health” (n=12).

The keywords assigned in the articles represent the main theme of the studies. Larger clusters have more keywords and those that are closer to each other have greater similarity in content (^{van Eck; Waltman, 2022}). Then, the VOSviewer® program built the network with recurring keywords at least three times. Of the total of 655 keywords, 40 were presented in the “network visualization” format, which highlights each cluster through different colors according to the thematic familiarity between the articles, as shown in Figure 1.

Source: Research data prepared by the software (2023).

Figure 1 Keyword in the network visualization format 

The program interface, through the network in the “overlay visualization” format, also informed the average time frame in which the articles were published. Table 1 presents a compilation of the VOSviewer® formulations. In it, the keywords were organized in the order in which they appeared in the clusters, with their occurrences, total connection strength, and annual average of publications.

Table 1 Keyword clusters, occurrences, total connection strength, and annual average of publications 

Clusters	N	Keyword	Occurrences	Total strength of the connections	Annual average
1 Red	1	Faculty	17	29	2017,35
	2	Nursing	8	18	2018,75
	3	Occupational health	6	11	2020,17
	4	Public policy	3	3	2021,67
	5	Quality of life	3	9	2020,00
	6	Teachers	20	33	2019,90
	7	Work conditions	12	21	2019,00
	8	Worker’s health	4	8	2020,50
2 Green	1	Basic education	5	6	2021.20
	2	Education	26	37	2019,46
	3	Education technology	3	2	2020,33
	4	Experience	3	4	2019,33
	5	Remote teaching	11	16	2020,73
	6	Teaching education	36	30	2020,06
	7	Teaching	27	26	2019,85
3 Dark blue	1	Covid-19	20	30	2021,50
	2	Gender	6	5	2020,00
	3	High school	3	4	2020,00
	4	Inclusive education	7	4	2020,29
	5	Learning	3	3	2021,00
	6	Physical education	13	18	2015,85
	7	Youth and adult education	3	5	2021,00
4 Light blue	1	Curriculum	8	13	2018,38
	2	Education policies	16	15	2020,12
	3	Historical-critical pedagogy	4	5	2020,00
	4	Public school	3	3	2021,33
	5	Rural education	10	8	2020,30
	6	Teaching work	77	73	2020,21
	7	Training	4	2	2021,50
5 Lilac	1	Higher education	6	8	2019,50
	2	Mental health	6	14	2020,17
	3	Precarious work	9	10	2020,89
	4	School	5	7	2020,00
	5	University	5	10	2020,00
	6	Work	6	14	2020,67
6 Yellow	1	Child education	10	14	2020,70
	2	Continuing education	9	12	2019,78
	3	Health	3	4	2017,33
	4	Historical-cultura theory	4	4	2022,00
	5	Language	3	4	2020,33

Source: Elaboration by the authors based on data processed by VOSviewer® (2023).

Each connection is a link between two items. Each link has a specific strength and those with greater strength indicate a greater number of publications in which two keywords are associated. The total strength of the connection marks the number of links the keyword has with other terms in the network. Thus, the occurrence is the count of these words in all analyzed articles (^{van Eck; Waltman, 2022}).

The 40 keywords that met the eligibility parameters formed six clusters. Authorial meditation on these groups and reading of the articles inspired the identification and interpretation of the main thematic axes in the 286 articles analyzed, as summarized and discussed below.

5 Final considerations

In this research, the question was: what are the most emphatic themes in Brazilian studies about teaching work? To answer this concern, a bibliometric study was developed, with the main objective of understanding what Brazilian researchers discuss at an international level regarding teaching work.

The analysis covered 286 articles published between March 12, 2008, and September 8, 2023. Until 2006, there was a reduced number of registrations in WoS, but, as of 2018, the numbers increased to 40-56 annual publications, registered in 11 categories, with educational being the most significant, which confirms the interdisciplinary interest in teaching work. The studies were even signed by scientists from Canada, Switzerland, Portugal, the United States and Chile.

The network of keywords, by elucidating the most innovative theme concerning teaching work (Covid-19 pandemic, ERT, learning, training, public policies, and precariousness) ratified the impact of this health problem on pedagogical activities.

The 40 most frequent keywords in the general corpus, when grouped into six clusters connected to each other, made it possible to identify six thematic axes: 1) working conditions adverse to teachers’ health; 2) DIT in teaching work; 3) singularities in teaching work; 4) teaching work and educational policies; 5) precariousness of teaching work; and 6) teaching work in early childhood education.

The precariousness of teaching work resulting from neoliberalism permeated all other axes and research carried out during and after the Covid-19 pandemic confirms the intensification of this chronic problem. The texts contextualize nuances of teaching work in Brazil and confront them with public educational policies, problematizing the lack of effectiveness, but also present recommendations, among which the relevance of initial and permanent teacher training is highlighted, as well as a permanent dialogue between resistance against the devaluation of education and teachers.

The two main perspectives that confront each other in Brazil concerning teaching work, a profession considered fundamental to society, but, at the same time, devalued is paradoxical. The lack of prestige experienced by teachers goes beyond the issue of remuneration and has repercussions on the production of knowledge and science, on teachers' health, and several other aspects. To mitigate these ruptures, it is opportune to continue the debate, extending it within and beyond the profession, the scientific community, society, and political entities.

The study did not consider production in other databases and indexers, however, given the methodological rigor and the significant number of 286 articles analyzed, it is believed to relevantly demonstrate the panorama of Brazilian scientific communications on teaching work.

For future studies, it is recommended to replicate the methodology outlined in this text on other platforms or update the current analysis to monitor the state of Brazilian research on teaching work and understand the arguments that Brazilian scholars raise and propagate.