The article revisits and updates questions that guided research that analyzed the repertoires of action adopted by teachers in the face of democratic construction processes that reached their peak in the 1970s, in Brazil and Portugal (Xavier,2013). Its central objective is to analyze the identity negotiations (Dubar, 2005) that permeated the political protagonism exercised by teachers in the actions and associations created in the influx of these movements. In the first topic, it locates the teaching movements in the space and time of the democratic transition and presents the questions that guided the writing of this article. In the second topic, it analyzes printed sources such as the mass circulation newspapers in Rio de Janeiro and the “O Professor” Magazine, with a view to observing the dissonant views regarding the establishment of an image of the teachers who participated in these movements. The third topic takes a statement relating to the experience of self-management lived in aPortuguese secondary school and highlights its reverberations in the interviewee's professional self-perception. In the final considerations, a brief reflection is developed on the disputes over the control of teaching identities and also on possible developments of this study. As a result of the analysis developed, it was possible to perceive the constitution of an engaged and autonomous teaching identity, through the analysis of the Magazine "O Professor". In turn, the mass circulation newspapers in Rio de Janeiro expressed the perspective of establishing a deviant identity in the face of teaching's political protagonism, triggering society's moral panic (Adorno, 1998), by condemning the collective actions that were part of the political repertoire of this professional group