The teacher’s relationship with the pedagogical knowledges, with the theoretical innovations, with the formulations that round that educational field and aim at reformulating or renewing the teaching know-how can be better understood when it is analyzed through the perspective of the transculturation and the appropriation that are done. Taking into account this goal, it is studied the trajectory of Botyra Camorim, emphasizing the relation of the teacher with the pedagogical knowledge. Botyra Camorim was born on March 3^rd, 1910, in São Paulo City (Brazil). In 1928, she graduated as an Elementary School Teacher at the Normal School of Bras. After she retired, Botyra started a career as a writer, but the teaching experience is for many times turned into a content of a literary structure.

But why was this trajectory chosen? At the end of her career Botyra published some texts that indicate the production of singular meanings, the way how the teacher appropriates the pedagogical ideas propagated in the first half of the twentieth century by educators from different countries. The appropriation was considered as it is defined by Chartier (1990, p.26): “a social history of the interpretations, thrown to their essential determinations (that are social, institutional, cultural) and based on the specific acts that produce them”.

The used sources were autobiographic and memorialist narratives, besides short articles published in a journal of a teacher’s association, of which Botyra was associated. The methodological procedure consists on analyzing some of the texts written by the teacher, considering their contents and structure, the context of the career in which they were published, the conditions of the writing. As a result, it is stated that operations of meaning production are related to the teacher’s individual and collective creativity also changing according to the working conditions. So, it is denied the full rejection or accession to the pedagogical innovations. Facing the transculturation of pedagogical knowledge, what teachers do is a way of creatively appropriating cultural and scholastic assets and, in this case, forge a selection of practices consistent with working conditions in a given time and space. It is in this sense that one can speak, also, of emancipation in the teaching know-how.