School teachers are occupying pivotal positions to identify and address the inequalities that are continuing to be perpetuated for children at school. Thus, being properly prepared with an intersectional understanding of social inequality during their pre-service teacher training is key to being able to address, scrutinize and challenge social inequality. Since teacher habitus affects their perception and assessment of high school students, preparing teachers adequately is necessary to achieve lasting structural changes. For future teachers, it is equally important to gain knowledge about the structural mechanisms of the reproduction of inequality as well as to reflect and irritate their own “habitual orientations” (Helsper, 2018, p. 131). To achieve such ambitions, it is necessary to ensure that those competencies are developed. In teacher education, the student teachers are not only students that strive for credit points, they are also future teachers and past school students. We as teachers have to teach and grade them as students; but they are also part of a research project where we as researchers try to initiate open communication about their own experiences with privilege and discrimination. Those multiple “double binds” offer a great setting for reflecting on the reproduction of inequality in educational institutions.

Situated in the field of sociology of education and gender studies, our paper aims to discuss the challenges concerning gender, class and other social inequalities in education that (future) teachers and we as researchers and academic teachers are confronted with. We present a project that is implemented in a BA teacher education course at the University of Graz, Austria. The goal is to raise critical awareness and help future teachers to address the hegemony of educational institutions by utilizing different reflective instruments that highlight the mechanisms of privilege and inequality in education.

Our project responds to the fact that educational institutions by and large are still shaped by a male middle-class habitus. Especially Bourdieus concepts of habitus and symbolic power provide a useful conceptual frame for understanding and reflecting on the powerful processes that establish and secure social inequality. Bourdieu and Passeron (1971) or bell hooks (1994) have discussed how educational institutions and the people involved in them contribute to reproduce intersecting inequalities (e.g. due to gender, class, migration, disability). Even today, against the background of wide spread gender equality policies and programs that are designed to encourage and support students from non-academic backgrounds, teaching and learning continue to be shaped by hierarchies and inequalities.

Social inequality can be understood as a difference in accessing social positions that is systematically bound to favorable and unfavorable living conditions and possibilities to act (cp. Solga, Berger & Powell, 2009, p. 15). The social conditions we grow up in shape our view of the world and give us a “feel for the game” (cp. Adkins, 2004, p. 191). They do not only influence our ways of thinking and perceiving the world, but form our bodies (hexis). The (gendered) body is therefore a product of processes of incorporating gendered and gendering social regimes (Thon, 2017, p. 131). More than the concepts of “doing gender” (West & Zimmermann, 1987) and “doing differences” (Fenstermaker & West, 2001), the concept of habitus (Bourdieu, 1982) explains the stability of classification and allocation processes. While Bourdieu has been criticized for rather explaining the reproduction of inequality than the transformation, Butlers (1993) focus on performativity of the social and her theory of iteration provide a fruitful perspective in search of possibilities for transformation and empowerment.

Realized as a combined teaching/research project and embedded in a pedagogical research seminar (two parallel courses), we address the phenomenon of social inequality and privilege with a mix of deconstruction, analytics of power and self-reflection. Following an action research approach and a common sense in feminist methodological debates (e.g. Altrichter & Feindt, 2008; DeVault, 1996; Wilkinson & Kitzinger, 1996), we try to initiate our research as a non-hierarchical, participatory relation with the students and to reflect on our own roles in the process. Accordingly, we conceptualize our course as a mutual learning environment for researchers and co-researchers, especially as the students have a triple role as students, researchers and as researched persons. In allowing them to bring up their own themes and stories, we acknowledge them as subjects with their own structures of relevance (Müller, 1984, p. 33f). By collecting data with methods like narrative interviews (Schütze, 1983), collective memory work (Haug, 2008) or photovoice (Wang & Burris, 1997) as well as diverse tools for self-reflection (Mendel/Costa 2018), the goal for student teachers is to gain knowledge and learn to scrutinize their own social status and their paths of education in regard to social power relations. This should help them to develop an understanding of inequality as a structural problem rather than focusing on individual experiences of success or failure.

As our research project is currently running, we will present our preliminary results, like which categories of inequality the student teachers bring up and how they are thematized. We want to discuss why some topics like gender issues or racism are obviously left out and how we can address intersecting social positions in a more fruitful way. This would also mean reflecting our role as academic teachers and researchers, as addressing differences also runs the risk of reinforcing them (Plößer & Mecheril, 2009). What might be enlightening to some might be shameful to others. For example, according to Leeb (2004) and Eribon (2017), an academic setting makes it especially hard to talk about class identity because the university is the institution where class differences should be overcome. Furthermore, we hope to see and will evaluate whether this pedagogical approach can foster students’ ideas about what drives inequalities and thus raise their awareness on how to take emancipatory action. Even though the focus on individual possibilities for action may seem to fall too short, it could be the goal to help the students to improve some sort of resistant attitude and to question the predominant conditions and practices in schools and universities. This way, a reflective pedagogy would make social inequality visible in order to question and counter it.

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