This paper is based on my own practice as a teacher educator at a university in the north-east of England and focuses on the effectiveness of dialogue as a tool for teaching the topic of socio-economic disadvantage in initial teacher education (ITE). The research was triggered by questions which had emerged within my work, about the compatibility of the liberal procedures of dialogic enquiry on the one hand, with the aims of critical teacher education on the other. Using critical realism as a theoretical framework, this article explores these tensions in a case study which follows dialogic enquiries across four consecutively taught groups of student-teachers. Results indicate that dialogic enquiry "can" be used as a powerful tool in social justice teaching in ITE, but that critical teacher educators have a duty to support students in identifying false understandings and the workings of inequality. Neutrality on the part of the teacher educator and notions of equal validity of the students' responses were thus found to be of secondary importance to the aims of social justice education. More widely, this article argues that critical realism can shed light on our understanding of the teaching of contentious and politically sensitive issues.