Distinctions between moral injury, moral distress and demoralisation represent a spectrum of legitimate responses to ethically stressful conditions but its unique phenomenology in the profession of teaching is underdeveloped. Most research conducted on moral injury has addressed military, health or first responder events, indicating differences in phenomenology are dependent profession. Reported in a ‘state of the science’ paper (Litz, 2025) research on MI is “preparadigmatic” (p.192); hampered by a lack of rigorous theoretical framing and tending to conflate exposure to potential moral injury events (PMIE) with outcome. Given that the emotional discourse of teaching garners significant recent attention (Karnovsky & Kelly, 2025) the unique dimensions of this moral stress continuum in educational work needs careful theorisation, flagging key painpoints requiring recognition in Australia.
This paper will critically explore nuances in the structural conditions of teachers’ work which may give rise to PMIEs, drawing on our research and the literature. We use the concept of dilemmatic spaces to highlight the relational environments and contextual factors shaping dilemmas in the profession of teaching. For example, we consider the way compassion fatigue, used as a proxy for moral injury (Oberg, 2025), is caused by systemic and relational failure in Australian schools. Further, education-specific moral ‘traps’ built in to structural conditions of educational policies, practices and cultures generate PMIEs (Cohen Lissman et al., 2024). Teachers witness the effects of grave failures in education, generating feelings of systemic betrayal, anger, resentment and injustice. The 2024 TALIS report indicates Australian teachers work longer instructional hours, have larger class sizes and fewer resources than the worldwide average (Friedman et al., 2025) and teacher shortages have a marked impact on educational outcomes (Teacher Shortages and Education Outcomes in New South Wales, 2023). Performance metrics exacerbate distrust in high accountability-low agency conditions, and enacting school policies of rigid pedagogical or over-assessment practices may cause shame and guilt. In this presentation, we begin to consider how these harms cut into the very possibility of educational work as an ethical practice. We conclude by identifying how key co-existing Australian educational policies intensify PMIEs under these poor conditions.