How Do Preservice Teachers Make Sense of Educational Inequalities? Exploring Critical Consciousness Through Mixed Methods

Background

Understanding how future educators explain and seek to dismantle educational inequalities is critical for promoting equity in schools. Critical consciousness encompasses recognizing structural inequalities (critical reflection), feeling capable of addressing them (self-efficacy), and engaging in actions to challenge social injustice (critical action). Although critical consciousness has been widely studied in youth and community contexts, considerably less is known about how preservice teachers interpret educational inequalities and how their critical consciousness relates to relevant predictors. This gap is important, as teachers’ structural attributions (critical reflection) and action intentions may meaningfully influence disparities related to socioeconomic status (SES) and family history of migration.

Method

To address this gap, we adopted a mixed methods design to examine how critical consciousness manifests among German preservice teachers, as well as the interrelations and predictors of its subcomponents. Ninety-three preservice teachers (M_age = 24.29 years) responded to open-ended questions assessing their attributions for educational gaps and intended actions to reduce them, and completed quantitative measures assessing self-efficacy and potential predictors of critical consciousness, including discrimination experiences, having taken classes on diversity and equity, social dominance orientation, and subjective SES. Open-ended responses were analyzed using qualitative content analysis to derive theoretically meaningful categories of attributions and action intentions. These categories were then quantized and integrated into the quantitative dataset for statistical analyses, enabling examination of both patterns in critical consciousness and their associations with potential predictors.

Results

Preservice teachers varied substantially in how they explained educational inequalities and articulated intended actions. Qualitative analyses identified structural (critical reflection), individual, and parental capital attributions. Integrated analyses showed that experiences of discrimination were positively associated with critical action intentions, suggesting that personal encounters with injustice may foster emancipatory engagement. In contrast, subjective SES negatively predicted critical action intentions. Social dominance orientation did not significantly predict structural attributions (in either the SES or migration domain), critical action, or self-efficacy. These findings provide insight into which factors are associated with different dimensions of critical conciousnesss toward educational inequality.

Conclusion

This study demonstrates that critical consciousness among preservice teachers can be meaningfully examined using a mixed methods design that integrates qualitatively derived insights into quantitative analyses. Extending prior research, we introduce parental capital attributions as an additional explanatory category. The findings suggest that discrimination experiences and subjective SES shape how future teachers intend to respond to educational inequalities. Understanding these dynamics can inform targeted teacher education programs aimed at strengthening preservice teachers’ capacity to recognize and address systemic inequities.