This article combines the results of research works on the production and circulation of pedagogical knowledge. We use here three different sources from the creation of such knowledge: documents from the National Reunions of Elementary Teachers; speeches from the Regional Centers for Educational Research and the textbooks used in the initial preparation of elementary teachers. These three sets of documents are particularly useful for the understanding of the arising and settlement of work rationalization on teaching activities emphasizing their methods and procedures that are characteristic of the Brazilian educational speech between the 1950s and the 1970s as well as the way they were built in various branches of the Brazilian educational field. From that point of view, it is possible to identify the disputes over the definition of technical dimensions of teaching among the agents located in different spots of the educational field, and sometimes simultaneously in more than one position: official state authorities, educational researchers and primary teachers. It is remarkable, when these discourses are compared, the increasing power of a technical view of teaching as unquestionable truth, as well as the constitution of the "theory" as a separate kind of pedagogical knowledge associated to the increasing legitimacy of the "educational technicians", that were simultaneously linked to the university and to the state.
educational knowledge; teaching technicality; education history