Drawing on the discourse theory of ideology, the central endeavor of this presentation is to demonstrate how different discourses and their ideological effects make an impact on teachers, surrounded by the specific social issues of an excluded Roma community in Poland. A wide range of discourses which are characteristic to post-socialist countries (nationalism, racism, chauvinism, etc.) intersect over this case. My focus on the social reality of the Other (the poor, the excluded, the marginalized) as a whole, instead of concentrating only on its representations in the classroom, is based on the theoretical standpoint that even if unjust social situations are related to and reproduced by education, they are also a product of an unjust social order. (Brown & Lauder, 2003; Lauder, Brown, Dillabough, & Halsey, 2006) Consequently, unjust social situations and their ideological contexts cannot be challenged and transformed solely inside the school, but in its relations to its social environment. However, since school is an elementary part - for Althusser (1977) the most central one - of the complex networking of state apparatuses, not only the school, but also other intersecting institutions and their discursive effects will be taken into account. A major assumption of the research is that schools and teachers are not completely at the mercy of the power-structure, and they have the potential to position themselves among the state apparatuses as transformative spaces. This transition can only be realized as a joined effort of teachers, students and parents, but must start with the transition of teachers’ relation to the ideological effects inscribed in the interdiscourse (Bakhtin, 1981, 1986; Foucault, 1972; Voloshinov, 1973) specific to the [g]local social and political context of Poland. I will argue that Paulo Freire’s cultural action supplemented with cultural therapy (cf. Spindler, 1999; Willis, 1981) could challenge teachers’ limit-situations and foster their engagement with the marginalized community. For Vieira Pinto, limit-situations are not “the impassable boundaries where possibilities end, but the real boundaries where all possibilities begin”. (Alvaro Vieira Pinto as cited in Freire, 1970, p. 99) I will conclude that the pedagogical potential of overcoming ideological effects in education is encoded in teachers’ active and reflective engagement with the school’s social context – in this specific case, with the Roma community.

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