The article provides a reflection on some critical components featuring teachers’
professional well-being construction. In addition to the known causes of the
burnout onset such as individual, emotional, and relational factors, the effects
that appear to be related to working conditions in its whole and, therefore, the
system in which the job is carried out, are considered. To examine these effects,
the article describes the results of two empirical studies independently conducted
in the Italian school system. Particularly, the two studies focus on the conditions
of social and professional well-being of nursery and primary schools teachers at
two distinct periods of the Italian school system evolution. During the ten years
lasting between the two studies, this school system has been affected by continuous
reform attempts, by temporary work increase, by a progressive weakening of the
social recognition of the profession, by the widespread presence in the classroom
of children belonging to different cultures, by the introduction of new technol-
ogies, and by the discrepancy between future teachers’ expectations and their
actual job. The reconsidering of these two study results on burnout, though they
partly confirm the results of other similar researches, raises the further question
with respect to the contextualization of the teachers’ discomfort expression in
relation to the wider professional identity weft in which they operate. This weft
seems to change with the changing of social and cultural education.