The Equalities Group

The UCET Equalities Group emerged at a moment when long standing inequalities could no longer be ignored. Although the Covid-19 pandemic did not create these inequalities it did expose the uneven impact of socio-economic, educational and health inequalities with painful clarity, especially for those with protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010. Disabled people experienced significant barriers to care, support and participation. The additional labour expected of women was heightened, particularly through caring responsibilities. Global majority communities experienced disproportionately poor health outcomes and loss. At the same time, the murder of George Floyd, the visibility of racial injustice, and the awarding gap in higher education (Office for Students, 2021) prompted many institutions to reflect more seriously on their own practices, responsibilities and silences.

For teacher educators, these issues were not separate from our work. They were present across programmes, partnerships, classrooms and conversations with student teachers. Many colleagues were already asking how teacher education might respond more thoughtfully to questions of equity, representation, and justice. It was in this context that Professor Vini Lander proposed the development of a UCET Equalities Group (Universities' Council for the Education of Teachers, n.d.). The group began in January 2021, as a small but important community. It offered a space for dialogue, support, belonging and knowledge exchange. As a community of practice, it brought together teacher educators who shared a concern and a commitment to learn from one another, to examine practice honestly, and to consider how teacher education might do better.

This collective commitment framed the workshop session that was presented at the UCET conference in November 2025. The workshop invited participants to examine the potential of teacher and teacher educator inquiry in promoting social justice within education. In this sense, inquiry is not simply an academic exercise it becomes a professional stance: a way of asking difficult questions, noticing what is often overlooked, and creating spaces where more honest and hopeful educational futures might become possible.

In this blog, we share two discussion prompts from the workshop, alongside the thinking that guided the line of inquiry we invited participants to explore.

The Discussion Prompts

Learning from relational experiences of student teachers: presented by Lyndsay Muir (she/her)

A letter sent by Joseph, a trans student, to his family, provided the prompt for discussion and dialogical learning (Silveira, 2019). Questions to prompt discussion included ‘what might we need to do/think about to support Joseph, as Teacher Educators?’ and ‘how might schools reproduce harm for trans student teachers?’. Initially, there was quiet reading and individual processing, whilst some people added comments or questions to the tablecloth, such as ‘disrupting thinking - opening up uncomfortable conversations. Gradually people initiated paired dialogue, ‘lingering with’ Joseph and the particular question of supporting minoritised student teachers.

There was listening; there was thoughtfulness; there was an extended period of ‘dwelling in’ the complexity and urgency of enabling teaching to be a profession that better reflects and serves the richness and diversity of humanity. And there was exchange of knowledge, experience, insight, praxis, and research on inclusion. The evolving authentic and scholarly dialogues were guided by the notion that learning to talk and talking to learn (Alexander, 2020) is vital in educators’ pedagogical repertoire, but also our teacher educators’ andragogy, when hosting dialogues is so necessary and needed as professional learning.

Reading the world: judgment, inquiry, and ethical resistance: presented by Anjali Shah (she/her)

One artefact invited participants to engage with a provocation drawn from Gert Biesta’s recent keynote: “Could Rosa Parks not read?” Paired with an image of Rosa Parks, this stimulus challenged narrow framings of literacy, competence, and compliance. Drawing on Biesta’s (2010) work on judgment and subjectification, Parks’ refusal was discussed not as a demonstration of skill, but as an ethical reading of the world.

Situated alongside letters, object dialogue boxes, and other café-style artefacts, this provocation fed into whole-group reflection on educational harm, quiet resistance, and how inquiry can help “turn up the volume” on such resistance. Participants named deficit discourses, performativity, and constrained notions of evidence as forms of mundane violence within schooling. Importantly, university teacher education was repeatedly positioned as a site of possibility, a space where inquiry can be protected, legitimised, and cultivated as ethical practice.

Summary

These discussion prompts invite us to begin with the relational experiences of student teachers and to consider how judgement can shape belonging, visibility and what is valued in teacher education. As the UCET Equalities group continues to create spaces that question taken-for-granted practices, we invite you to consider the role of inquiry in this work and reflect on the two accounts presented in this blog. As teacher educators, we can use artefacts, narratives and dialogic approaches within our own teaching sessions to create space for critical reflection, challenge assumptions, and support colleagues and student teachers to recognise and respond to educational harm. In doing so, we encourage you to use these accounts to notice and reflect on how inclusion and belonging are shaped within your own teacher education contexts.