The objective of this presentation is to show the results of research in which I explored the ECE teachers' awareness of social classes. As a teacher-student, I often observed a lot of reluctance towards some of the pupils from their teachers. Very often those children were from underprivileged families. I also observed and read a lot about inequalities in education, which led me to think about whether teachers, especially those from early childhood education have knowledge and awareness about social division and how this affects the pupils they work with.

According to Bourdieu's theory of socio-cultural reproduction, children start their schooling with different inherited capitals, but the school treats pupils as if they all have the same starting position while assuming that all children are expected to acquire the same skills, knowledge and level of 'cultural familiarity'. This situation allows middle- and upper-class children to benefit from the resources brought from home and early schooling (Grochalska, 2009: 63). Pupils for whom the values of the dominant culture are distant may consequently drop out of further education at a certain stage of their education or consciously choose ‘an educational profile that reproduces the life path of their parents’ (Szkudlarek, 2007: 35). However, the idea is not that students with low-class backgrounds should be deprived of the chance to change their social position, but that those working with the pupils should understand that school is part of a system that reproduces the social structure.

There are divergences in the literature in defining social class. Some authors speak of the 'death of classes' in most developed societies (Pakulski, Waters, 1996, in Lareau, 2008: 4) or the 'obsolescence of the term', including in relation to education, without denying the existence of social inequalities (Harris, 2018: i-ii). Anette Lareau notes that social classes are often written about in a non-explicit way, using terms such as 'inequality’, ‘stratification’, ‘origin’ or analysing specific indicators such as education, wealth, income, and occupation (Lareau, 2008: 3). Also in common parlance, the term appears to be ambiguous (Wright, 2005: 1) or attempts are made to strip it of its political character, as is the case, for example, in Palska's research (Gdula, Sadura, 2012: 18). In Poland, the issue of social classes seems to be perceived rather as a historical relic. The vocabulary used to describe the social structure, i.e. terms like: 'working class’, ‘social classes’, ‘exploitation’, ‘capital’, ‘class conflict’, ‘class struggle’  (Zuk, 2010: 9), is associated with the past social system and tends to be no longer used. On the other hand, some researchers stress that we are intuitively aware of the existence of social classes (Sadura, 2012). Despite the colloquial social perception of social classes, Polish researchers undertake class analyses, including those devoted to Bourdieu's concept, which I also adopted as the basis for my exploration on social classes and educational inequality (Gdula, Sadura, 2012).

Adopting Sadura’s approach to Polish social structure, we can distinguish three main social classes in Poland: higher, middle and lower (Gdula, Sadura, 2012). All three of them have different ways of life as well as different ways of learning which is a part of the way of living and living necessities (Sadura, 2017). Understanding this is crucial to creating inclusive school environments and developing the idea of equal chances.

The empirical material that this presentation draws on comes from a research project in which I explored whether ECE teachers are aware of the existence of class divisions and whether this (un)awareness is visible in their work with pupils. 14 ECE teachers of varying seniority working in the Polish education system took part in the study. The teachers differed in terms of the geographical location of their schools (eight of them worked in large cities, two – in small towns, and four – in rural areas) and their experience with working in a class-diverse environment. Interviewed teachers worked in a school in a neighbourhood with a bad reputation; perceived to be affluent; in a socially diverse environment; in areas with high economic deprivation, in a place that formed an enclave by being a private institution for parents with high economic capital and in places that were so-called urban bedroom communities. I used the grounded theory methodology (Charmaz, 2009) and a bricolage of interpretive approaches in the research project (Kvale, 2012). The narrative and semi-structured interviews were used to collect data. The opening question during the narrative interview was about family relationships, especially from childhood and educational experiences up to the time the interviewee entered university. The semi-structured interview questions focused on four areas: the teacher's workplace, the teacher's vision of the child, the perception of pupils' educational opportunities, and social inequalities. Most of the interviews were conducted in two sessions, one for the narrative part, and the other for semi-structured. They lasted from 45 minutes to 2 hours. All interviews were recorded and transcribed. The responses were coded inductively; the analysis itself was divided into two stages: the identification of teachers' awareness of social class and the analysis of teachers' private pedagogical theories, resulting in a middle-range theory of a preliminary typology of teachers' private pedagogical theories of the possibilities for pupils to change their social trajectories. To identify the social class awareness of teachers, I analysed their explicit statements about what class they belonged to, whether their position had changed during their lifetime, as well as the non-explicit statements I was able to generate from other parts of the interviews. The research was carried out in line with the principles of ethical research conduct, with consent obtained from all participants.

The analysis followed three steps: exploring the class self-identification of the teachers participating in the research; analysing the language used by the teachers concerning social class; identifying the areas of the teachers' awareness of social class. Twelve teachers answered the question about their class affiliation, six of whom explicitly defined their class affiliation using terms such as middle class, intelligence, economically average, so in the middle, borderline average, and lower borderline average. Five teachers answered the question by comparing their current social class with their class of origin. One teacher said that her current social class was higher than that of her childhood, and one identified ‘social class’ with ‘classroom’. After self-identification of the teacher’s social position, I explored the language teachers were using and was able to distinguish explicit and non-explicit statements related to social class. In the third step, I explored areas of the teachers’ class awareness determined on the basis of their non-explicit statements concerned issues such as economic, cultural capital, dichotomous perception of reality, the neighbourhood in which the educational institution is located, social position, reproduction of family lifestyles and ‘indirect differentiation’. Based on the data collected, I distinguished four groups of teachers' class (un)awareness: a group of teachers who valorise social differentiation (6), those who observe social differentiation (4), those who do not perceive social differentiation (3), and a group of teachers who have no class awareness (1). The first conclusion after analysing the empirical material leads one to conclude that social class content appears in the narratives of the teachers. It occurs independently of the question of the teacher's class identification. The second conclusion, however, is that, overall, there is little content related to class awareness in their narratives as well as addressing the issue of changing the social order.

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