Poverty and disadvantage in education – long important themes in educational discourses - have become renewed areas of concern in this century as the levels of social inequality in British society have increased. Yet in teacher education, we know little about student teachers’ understanding of the inter-relationships between poverty and educational disadvantage and their preparation during pre-service for working with children living in poverty. Our research questions are: how can teacher educators prepare student teachers for their placements in low income schools in some of London’s most socio-economically deprived areas? How can we help students understand the schools in which they will work? How might our pedagogies of preparation for the practicum best draw on research to support student teachers in understanding the effects of poverty on the education of the pupils they will teach there? Following Hargreaves (1995:32), our argument is that ‘what it means to be in teacher education.... can only properly be understood by firmly locating our studies of teacher education in space as well as in time’. We also have interests in pedagogies of inquiry into personal positionality. This is a theoretical paper, drawing on three types of research: 1) international research on teaching for social justice (particularly in terms of combating the effects of poverty and other forms of socio-economic disadvantage) in teacher education. We also consider work on student identities in relation to understanding these factors; 2) international research on teaching in preparation for the practicum and on student teachers’ experiences, including Robinson’s (2014) emphasis on emotionality; 3) theoretical research into concepts of space/place in relation to personal identities and emotional experience. Here we draw both on research from social geographers, Massey (2005) on space, and educational thinking about pedagogies of place, including the work of Somerville (2011). Our initial research indicates that- theoretically at least - grounding pedagogies of preparation for the practicum in understanding of space/place – including in the physical locations of the schools in their communities – may generate enhanced knowledge of educational disadvantage. We conclude that pedagogies for understanding poverty and educational disadvantage also need to involve identity work which can be uncomfortable and challenging. These pedagogies need to be compassionate with orientations towards kindness and empathy rather than judgement (Boyland and Woolsey 2015:66). The research contributes new knowledge to the under-researched area of teacher education pedagogies in preparing for the practicum in low income schools.

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