The classroom is the privileged space for negotiation and production of new senses and meanings, especially concerning the different school concepts. This takes place within a complex interactive network where, besides formal knowledge itself, teachers' and students' life history and experiences become present and are updated. The teacher is expected to guide his/her group of students, aiming at understanding and negotiating the different meaning-making processes involved in the learning situations he/she has planned. The teacher has usually been identified with this mediator role, and this idea has been assigned to the historical and cultural approach. The objective of this text is to discuss the identification between teacher action and mediation, in order to characterize what the work developed by the teacher corresponds to according to our point of view, focusing on the zone of proximal development concept. The considerations suggest that learning contents will only be at the service of student development if they are operated taking into account the conjuncture of their meaning-making processes, and observing that the utmost role of education is to promote relational possibilities.
TEACHERS; STUDENT TEACHER RELATIONSHIP; TEACHER ROLE; CLASSROOMS