The Entitled Teacher: Perpetrator or Victim?

Abstract

As noted in the introduction, this book is concerned with resistance to professional guidance that teachers may evince as they hold rigidly to an ‘inherited script’ that undermines the flexibility needed to respond to the emergent needs of learners. We propose that this resistance, and the sense of excessive entitlement that propels it, are responses to fundamentally incoherent theorizations of learning that form the basis for unworkable pedagogical models promulgated by reform-oriented teacher educators. Inherited scripts, therefore, are the only working models of pedagogy available to teachers, torn by the need to make sense of their own teaching while fending off the incomprehensible demands of their academic mentors. Our critique of learning theory is based on Thomas Kuhn's well-known perspectives on preparadigmatic science. Our thesis is that the various branches of learning theory reflect incommensurable interpretations of learning. Thus, any synthesis of perspectives – for instance, in reform pedagogies – is necessarily unstable. We support this critique through an examination of a lesson in an afterschool philosophy club illustrating lapses in reform-oriented pedagogy that trace back to incoherent theoretical framings.

Citation

Kirshner, D. and Skinner, K. (2021), "The Entitled Teacher: Perpetrator or Victim?", Ratnam, T. and Craig, C.J. (Ed.) Understanding Excessive Teacher and Faculty Entitlement (Advances in Research on Teaching, Vol. 38), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 103-116. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-368720210000038007