Experiences of discomfort in social justice education with pre-service teachers: understanding and responding to student resistance

Engaging in discomfort is often considered essential for meaningful social justice education with pre-service teachers. Yet the way in which discomfort is experienced by such students is an underdeveloped area of the literature. In this article, we explore student feedback survey (n = 2303) and interview (n = 3) data from pre-service teacher education courses that engage with discomforting content, gathered from an Australian university over a five-year period from 2019–2023. We also draw upon data from an auto-ethnographic focus group conducted with authors of this article, as teaching staff working on these courses during this time. We consider how discomforting content is experienced by students, and how educators understand and respond to these experiences. We argue that while discomfort is viewed as valuable by some students, others resist the destabilisation of their presuppositions, reflected in concerns about ‘bias’ and a distancing of the self. This range of responses, considered alongside educator perspectives, prompts new questions regarding how much discomfort is appropriate, for which students and in what ways; and the institutional structures that do, and do not, support it.