Education systems aim to provide equal educational opportunities to individuals with different cultural backgrounds and social statuses in line with the principle of equal opportunity. However, when this approach fails to consider individuals' different needs, starting conditions, and cultural capital, it can lead to the reproduction of existing social inequalities under the guise of equality. In this context, social justice in education requires not only providing the same opportunities to everyone but also recognizing differences and implementing pedagogical arrangements sensitive to these differences. Indeed, it is known that students' academic achievement is influenced by their families' socioeconomic status (Coleman et al., 1966) and their cultural and social capital (Bourdieu and Passeron, 2021; Bourdieu and Passeron, 2022). Therefore, social justice practices gain meaning beyond educational policies, in teaching processes and classroom interactions where inequalities are concretely reflected. For this reason, learning environments emerge as areas where social justice is not theoretically discussed but actually tested. The immediate pedagogical decisions teachers make while interacting with students, content, and institutional structures reveal how social justice gains meaning in education.

Even if the education system and teaching programs are structured in line with the understanding of social justice, the impact of these programs in the classroom is largely determined by the perceptions of social justice held by teachers in their role as implementers. Preventing the reproduction of structural inequalities in education requires teachers to go beyond being mere technical actors implementing the program and to adopt a social justice-oriented pedagogical stance (Cochran-Smith et al., 2016). In this context, how teachers understand social justice-based pedagogy and how they reflect it in their classroom practices plays a critical role in ensuring equality and justice in education. Accordingly, teachers are expected to go beyond deficiency-based approaches to disadvantaged groups and adopt pedagogical approaches that center students' experiences, such as discomfort pedagogy and empathy pedagogy, and reflect these approaches in their classroom practices (Zembylas & Papamichael, 2017). These pedagogical orientations position teachers not merely as transmitters of knowledge, but as educators who confront structural inequalities in education and take on transformative responsibilities. In line with this understanding, Giroux (1988) defines teachers as transformative intellectuals who play a critical role in the process of social transformation. Therefore, assessing the impact of social justice in education requires examining how teachers interpret and implement these principles in classroom interactions.

Based on the assumption that social justice in education is concretized through the immediate decisions teachers make when encountering inequalities and tense interactions in the classroom, this study focuses on meaningful classroom events experienced by teachers in relation to social justice. The study aims to examine how social justice is established in classroom interactions and the responsibilities teachers assume in these moments through their responses to such events. In this context, social justice is addressed through teachers' decisions to recognize inequalities in classroom interactions, intervene in them, and support students' equitable participation in learning processes. While studies describing teachers' perceptions of social justice and general practices exist in the literature (Öngel & Tabancalı, 2025; Bursa & Ersoy, 2016), there are also studies that examine implemented social justice pedagogies in the classroom context (Philpot et al., 2020) and present teacher profiles based on teachers' responses by addressing the causes of challenges related to cultural diversity (Güven et al., 2023). This study goes beyond teachers' general perceptions of social justice and focuses on the momentary pedagogical decisions in which social justice is concretized in classroom interactions, thus offering a unique contribution to the European literature. Furthermore, the use of the critical incident technique serves as a starting point for research that can be deepened in subsequent stages through observation-based studies.

This research is designed as qualitative. As it focuses on how teachers perceive the concept of "social justice," it has an interpretive and phenomenological epistemological understanding. Furthermore, as it also addresses how teachers' perceptions of "social justice" within educational practices are reflected in classroom applications, the critical incident technique was used in data collection and analysis. Although the critical incident technique, developed with a behavioral psychology background, was first used during World War II to analyze the performance of fighter pilots (Flanagan, 1954), it has been flexibly adapted as a qualitative technique to various research areas such as educational sciences, human resources, and health services (Butterfield et al., 2005). The participants in the study are classroom teachers working in villages in a province in eastern Turkey. Homogeneous situation sampling, a purposeful sampling method, was preferred in determining the participants. This is because interpreting the diversity in perceptions of the same concept (social justice) and the differences in its application in classroom practices seems logically more feasible under conditions that are as homogeneous as possible. The research data is collected through face-to-face interviews using a semi-structured interview form developed by the researchers. The interview form was developed with input from experts regarding its suitability for the critical incident technique, its consistency with the research objectives, and its potential to provide high-quality qualitative data. The interview questions require teachers to describe in detail a situation that required them to make an immediate pedagogical decision related to social justice in the classroom; what they did or chose not to do in that situation; the pedagogical, individual, and institutional factors that shaped that decision; the implications of that decision on classroom interactions; and their assessment of whether they would make a different decision in the same situation in retrospect. Content analysis (Patton, 2018) will be conducted on the collected data to inductively reveal the categories, themes, and patterns within the data. Other elements found in the literature for the critical incident technique will also be considered (Flanagan, 1954; Gremler, 2004; Stauss 1993).

The initial impressions drawn from the data collected so far suggest that teachers have a more superficial understanding of the concept of social justice than its theoretical definition in the literature, and that this superficial understanding does not enable teachers to perform effectively in ensuring social justice in classroom practices. However, it is anticipated that teachers who have had negative experiences with social justice in their personal lives or who have a deeper understanding of social justice will have different stories to tell.

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