Epistemic justice: a twofold mission for human rights and social sustainability in teacher education

This article, based on Miranda Fricker’s concept epistemic injustice to deal with human rights and social sustainability, argues that teacher education must address the twofold mission to both enhance epistemic justice for student teachers and to develop their skills to enhance justice for future pupils. Thus, development of student’s ethical leadership involving transformative teaching is in focus. Based on previous research, ethical leadership is focused on self-awareness, character formation and modelling. This focus involves both verbal and bodily expressions. Verbal expressions are reinforced and developed through conceptualization, dilemmas and ethical codes while bodily expressions are reinforced and developed through modelling. In terms of modelling, Merleau-Ponty's theory of how people's embodied experiences shape their life worlds provides perspective on opportunities to develop transformative teaching to challenge norms and enable change. Empirical data from a previous phenomenological study on professional ethics in teacher education exemplifies teaching practice related to epistemic justice.