The Teacher as Epistemic Intermediary: Vocational Imagination, Evaluative Habitus and Professional Identity Formation in Contexts of Vulnerability

At a time when the crisis of teacher professional identity intersects with the growing displacement of students whose biographies remain excluded from dominant cultural repertoires, the question of who gets to imagine a vocational future — and under what conditions — becomes a pressing pedagogical concern. The evaluative habitus that teachers incorporate tends to reproduce the legitimacy criteria of the dominant culture, generating forms of epistemic injustice that silence non-normative trajectories and naturalise exclusion. This paper introduces vocational imagination as a pedagogical category to analyse both the fragility of professional identity and the narrowing of students' horizons, and proposes the construct of fictional displacement to name those situations in which a subjectively robust trajectory is rejected not because of the subject's weakness, but because of the institution's insufficient interpretive repertoires. On this basis, and within the framework of permanent guidance, the paper outlines the figure of the teacher as epistemic intermediary, capable of recognising mechanisms of symbolic violence in guidance processes, of adopting an intersectional gaze as a diagnostic competence, and of exercising institutional courage as a professional resource. Vocational imagination thus emerges as a necessary condition for a teaching profession that seeks to resist reproductive logic, embracing epistemic justice as the regulative horizon of educational practice.