Becoming Critically Conscious Under Continuous Collective Trauma: Palestinian Teacher Education in Israel

This qualitative study examines how Palestinian educators in Israel describe the development and enactment of critical consciousness amid ongoing collective trauma and sociopolitical constraints. Drawing on interviews with 23 educators recruited through purposive and participant-referral sampling, it explores reported changes in their understandings of knowledge, professional identity, institutional power, and pedagogical possibilities following engagement with critical pedagogy. Recruitment began with former graduate students who had taken critical-pedagogy courses taught by the researcher and expanded through referrals to other eligible teachers. The findings suggest that participants did not describe a uniform progression from awareness to action. They reported greater recognition of the political and institutional conditions shaping education, alongside heightened awareness of professional vulnerability and the potential consequences of critical expression. Two patterns were particularly salient. First, criticality was selective: what participants were willing to question varied across domains and according to what they perceived to be at stake. Second, some participants described indirect pedagogical practices, including questioning and mediated dialogue, as ways to sustain critical inquiry while navigating perceived constraints. The study proposes an integrative-ecological understanding of critical consciousness that brings critical recognition, professional identity, institutional and sociopolitical conditions, vulnerability, and situated agency into a shared interpretive framework. It suggests that greater critical awareness may expand perceived possibilities for pedagogical action while also making constraints and risks more visible. These findings complicate linear and resistance–compliance accounts of critical consciousness and point to the need for teacher education that attends to the uneven, relational, and context-dependent conditions under which critical awareness may become pedagogical action.