Teaching social justice education: the nature, role and future of discomfort

Teaching social justice within initial teacher education is a fraught endeavour, often interwoven with discomforting forms of learning for both teacher educators and the students they work with. In this article, we introduce the special issue, ‘Teaching social justice education: the nature, role and future of discomfort’. We discuss the impetus for the issue–borne out of both personal professional circumstances as well as the current socio-political climate–and establish some conceptual foundations for discomfort as a part of teacher education. As socio-cultural institutions that are always already interwoven with power differentials, we argue that schools and preservice teacher education are ongoing sites of interest and significance for such work, in which the pursuit of ‘social justice’ is a contested yet necessary aim. We provide an introduction to the articles included in the issue and how they variously engage with the nature and operation of discomfort, and other attendant concerns such as power and violence. Overall, we seek to open up discussion of the discomforting work being done in initial teacher education, generating deeper understanding of the role such learning can play and how it could and should be supported.