Where the Role Is Silent and Desire Speaks: Transition and Second Training in the Professional Life of Teachers. An Exploratory Study

Abstract

The paper explores the transition from work to retirement as a formative and desiring space, questioning teachers’ professionalism beyond the institutional boundaries of their role. Through a qualitative study based on narrative interviews with teachers and educators, it investigates how formative desire, vulnerability, and identity continuity operate within this liminal passage, fostering processes of self-reformulation and new forms of educational presence. Professionalism emerges as a lifelong practice that exceeds the career path, becoming an act of care, testimony, and transmission. Retirement thus appears as a time of second formation, where desire and responsibility intertwine in a renewed way of inhabiting one’s story.