Situated within the ‘big tent’ of critical scholarship (Lather, 1998), the pursuit of social justice agenda’s in education broadly, and HPE specifically, have been relatively modest in practice, despite an extensive (and growing) body of work advocating these laudable aims (Hickey et al., 2019). Substantial scholarship has identified the role of initial teacher education (ITE) in ‘subverting the conditions and practices that serve to privilege, albeit unwittingly, individuals who project particular behaviours and dispositions over those that do not’ (Hickey & Mooney, 2019, p. 148). In short, it appears that despite the introduction of a national curriculum underpinned by social justice and emancipatory aims in HPE a decade ago (Macdonald, 2013) and a policy imperative instantiated through national teacher standards to practise in socially inclusive ways, examples of ways in which various practices in HPE contribute and reproduce injustices for many young people continue to be reported. Understanding the conditions that support dispositional interrogations that manifest in pedagogical practices becomes key to achieving changes to teacher’s practices (Hickey et al., 2019). While it seems blatantly obvious that ITE has a role to play in achieving this, the manifestation of broader political discourses and agendas at both the federal level, with the capability levers and responsibility of funding Higher Education and ITE providers, and at the local state level with the responsibility for funding schools and the teacher workforce, constrains what can be achieved across various levels of the Australian education system. Fernandez-Balboa (2017) argues that key here is a redirect from the social to the personal – to understand more about what enables or constrains the conditions of pedagogical practice, we need contemporary insights into the personal drivers (biographical, social and political) of certain practices. Against a backdrop of global and local political crises, financial and economic collapse, pandemics, climate change and social conflict, relatively little is known about the ways in which teacher’s personal politics shape constructions of social justice and their pedagogical practices. This paper reports preliminary findings from a pilot questionnaire with approximately 50 pre-service and graduate Australian HPE teachers located in the state of Victoria to examine the ways in conceptions of social justice are shaped through broader political dispositions. Findings are analysed through descriptive statistics and qualitative responses thematically analysed (Braun & Clarke, 2006) to identify the ways in which personal politics become implicated in conceptions of social justice and practices of social justice pedagogies

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