Beliefs about equity, inclusion and social justice in ITE

According to the Teacher Educators' Diversity-Responsive Practices (TE-DIP) framework presented by Ponet et al. (2025), teacher educators play a key role in ensuring that future teachers promote equity, diversity and social justice in the classroom. In order to advance the development of strategies that address these issues, the same authors point out that questioning the reference frameworks themselves is essential for the teaching practices used by teacher educators to move forward in this direction. In other words, challenging the beliefs and assumptions that implicitly guide teaching practice promotes the modelling of equitable, inclusive and socially just practices during the education of pre-service teachers. Based on this idea, the present resource suggests the need to analyse how personal beliefs influence the way educators address these issues in the classroom. The purpose of the activity is to promote a process of analysis of teacher educators' beliefs regarding equity, diversity and social justice in the initial teacher education classroom, using the parable of ‘The Chained Elephant’ as a catalyst, which allows us to understand how past teaching experiences can limit the implementation of actions aimed at promoting these three key concepts.