Understanding Excessive Teacher and Faculty Entitlement: Volume 38

The notion of excessive teacher entitlement arose out of concerns with trying to understand and find a language to describe the paradox of faculty/teachers' intransigence in the face of the flexibility required of them to promote the learning and well-being of all in the institutions they serve. Through unique narratives, the authors trace the parallel paths they negotiated in their challenging curricular journeys, which led them to unmute teachers' voices cached in reform stories. The first author, Tara Ratnam, coined the term “excessive teacher entitlement” to characterize the putative deficit view of teachers that is projected onto them and how the concept of the teachers' “best-loved self,” which the second author, Cheryl Craig, developed, embraces teachers' input and complements “excessive teacher entitlement,” albeit from a different direction and perspective. This introduction also provides a bird's-eye view of the diverse ways and contexts in which leading international authors examine excessive teacher entitlement in the 17 chapters that follow.

This chapter identifies the broad interdisciplinary ideologies of entitlement in order to situate and understand the potential theoretical informants of excessiveness in teacher entitlement. Although the authors' perspectives and experiences on the theme of entitlement are located in the US educational system, this is accompanied by an awareness of the need to examine the topic internationally since the topic needs to “be reconsidered in terms of contextual variables.”

Psychological and organizational entitlement were the prevalent strains of entitlement that emerged in the reviewed literature and “academic entitlement” specific to the field of education. Therefore, three strands, psychological, organizational and academic, form the thematic categories for this scoping literature review.

Most literature on “academic entitlement” deals with excessive entitlement amongst students. No reference to excessive teacher entitlement was found. However, specific gaps were found in: (1) what qualifies as excessive teacher entitlement, (2) research scholarship on teacher entitlement, and (3) entitlement studies specifically aimed at global reach and applicable to teachers.

The theoretical informants of teacher entitlement identified in this study indicate that the phenomenon goes beyond individual mindset to encompass the mediation of sociocultural and political factors in its construction, thus rendering a simple theory of excessiveness in association with teacher entitlement improbable at this time.

This chapter explores the concept of entitlement among school teachers and university professors in terms of long-standing characteristics of the culture of schooling. Features of the school culture are introduced with a short excerpt from a science lesson that illustrates how the authority of a teacher's position can be substituted for the teacher's authority of knowledge or reason. Introduction of the concept of the authority that arises from experience leads to discussion of entitlement arising from viewing teaching as a gift rather than a service. If teaching is a service, are students not entitled to a voice in their learning? To illustrate, a three-decade project to develop students' voice and responsibility in their learning is discussed. Given the unique characteristics of teaching and teacher education, the chapter closes with the suggestion that the ultimate indication of teacher entitlement may be teachers not realizing the importance of teaching their students how to learn.

Our investigation of the emerging issue of teacher entitlement is viewed from the perspective of researchers trying to make sense of the concept with the intention of exploring its links to inclusive educational practice, teacher education and research. This chapter is therefore mainly conceptual, focusing on the limits and possibilities offered by the extension of the concept of entitlement, first relating to students, now extended to the teaching profession. The concept of entitlement is gaining currency principally in the Anglo-Saxon literature but should also be reconsidered in relation to contextual influences. In the educational field, debates denote several ‘displacements of concepts’, as shown in the extensive reviews and analyses of the concept of entitlement attitudes we undertake in this work. We first discuss developments and interpretations of the concept of entitlement specific to different disciplines in the literature. Then we undertake a contextual reframing based on a redefinition of the concept drawing on input from empirical research data, which emphasizes the challenges encountered when dealing with the phenomena of social cohesion, ethics and cultural diversity in education. The findings highlight the potential benefits of integrating the concept of teacher entitlement into valid strategies for implementing an inclusive and ethical educational process.

Teachers are professionals accredited by society to educate the younger generation for their future. Therefore, their feelings of entitlement are based both on their sense of their role and their awareness of their students' successes. However, it is necessary to define the term teacher entitlement. Every teacher must feel entitled to teach, i.e., have the necessary disciplinary knowledge and pedagogical-didactic skills in order to feel confident enough to do so, but should never feel so entitled as to ignore that we now live in a dynamic world where approaches to education change much more rapidly and methodologies must adapt. Teachers who base their sense of entitlement on their past successes and refuse to adapt are seen as having excessive entitlement that harms their students' preparation for life as productive adults. Examining the complexity of teachers' roles through different eras of education and different periods of teachers' careers serves as the core of this chapter which examines teachers' justified and unjustified feelings of entitlement and their influence on their work, with particular focus on two issues that affect aspects of teacher entitlement: inclusion of students with special needs and the effects of cultural diversity on learning development.

This chapter investigates the phenomenon of teachers' “entitled attitude” that manifested itself as resistance to change in the midst of a curricular reform in the Indian school context. For teachers long socialized into a teacher-centered culture, the change expected was nothing less than a paradigm shift in the Kuhnian sense. However, conclusions drawn from studies involving cursory surveys and teacher observation pinned the problem to teachers' “entitled attitude,” an unwillingness to exert themselves beyond the minimum level required by school policies. This view reflects a lack of acknowledgement of teachers as persons with values and the capacity to think and feel as potential agents of community practices such as schooling. My study investigates the wider sociocultural historical and political basis of teachers' putative “entitled attitude” informed by Lev Vygotsky's dialectical approach. It accesses the interrelated history of a teacher at a number of levels using the teacher's life history to create the narrative. This “genetic” analysis helps illuminate what the curricular change means to teachers inside out. The findings are used to unravel the nature of support that would help teachers realize their agency and sway them from using entitlement as a compensatory mechanism to deflect change.

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.

Entitlement persists on the basis of race, gender, age, sexuality, language and able-bodiedness, despite all efforts to eradicate it – and abetted by some efforts to preserve it. Compounding this, as teachers, it is easy for us to become habituated to possessing the only knowledge of value in the room. This chapter takes place against a backdrop of movements such as Black Lives Matter, and its Australian manifestation, Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, the Me Too movement, on women's workplace rights and freedoms, movements against homophobia and transphobia, and quests for equality of accessibility. In particular, we explore the notion that Australia is a haunted nation – one that has not confronted its colonial past or properly reconciled with its first peoples and their descendants. Just as the nation needs to come to terms with its past, our conversations for this chapter will confront us with our own pasts and differing subjectivities. We make use here of our own stories in challenging entitlement, in ourselves and others.

Using a grounded theory approach, this study aims to develop a framework of teacher entitlement in Iran. The preliminary findings point to chronic socio-economic frustration as the main theme present in the entitlement discourse among Iranian teachers. Teachers were highly dissatisfied and felt that they deserved better social and economic advantages. The chapter unearths the dynamics of power relations in the wider educational context, and several factors in the immediate practical context of teaching (i.e., poor quality of teaching environments, crisis in teachers' professional identity, the complexities of teaching), that produced entitlement perceptions which, in turn, led to unacceptable behavior on the part of some teachers. The study also considers the negative impact of entitled teachers in schools on teacher–learner relationships and offers a conceptual framework for understanding teacher entitlement in the context of Iran.

While “academic entitlement” focuses on student entitlement and its consequences, there is a need to be aware of the consequences of teachers' entitled feelings arising from their subjective perceptions on student learning. This micro-ethnographically oriented study uses the case of an eleven-year-old fifth-grade student's low academic performance at a Spanish primary school to unravel the notion of excessive teacher entitlement embodied in the social organization of schooling. A qualitative analysis of teachers' perceptions of this student's low performance showed that most of their opinions were subjective, based on their deep-rooted deficit view of students. These beliefs seemed to make teachers feel entitled to blame the student and her background instead of arousing self-reflection leading to self-realization and change in practice. The study points to teacher entitled feelings as a symptom of the wider sociocultural mores that make teachers assume the power to arbitrate without considering students' situated needs. This study draws attention to the need to help teachers become conscious of and analyze self-entitlement to enable them to base their decisions on reason rather than prejudice.

This chapter focuses on issues that arise when certain professors invoke the age-old hierarchy of position their terminal degrees bestow on them and interact in elevated ways with graduate students and sometimes with faculty members as well. Lack of relationship with peers/students, absence of appreciation for others' contributions and resistance to change, coupled with academic positions that allow them to aggrandize themselves (and get away with it) sit at the core of some male behaviors I have experienced. In this work, Lugones' notions of “arrogant perception” and “loving acceptance” are used as the central conceptual lens through which three in situ, betwixt-and-between career experiences are presented, unpacked and traced to their roots. While position, gender and power play out excessively in the three featured scenarios in this work, this does not mean that all males claim and act on the dominant plotline that history has bestowed on them. Neither does it mean that all females reject that plot as well. The shifting positioning of both males and females are sample topics for potential follow-up research.

The context of this study is Brazil, which has seen more than a decade of expansion in higher education and increased access to public universities. Our investigation deals with the perceptions of novice faculty members or “professors”, as they are addressed in Brazil, on entitled behavior at universities. These professors participants are from institutions located in three different states in Brazil. We wanted to find out how these newcomers to university teaching perceived entitled attitudes in faculty–students and faculty–peer interactions. The chapter includes possible implications for relations in the workplace and discusses the gaps between expectations of the nature of social relationships in the universities among faculty and between faculty and students, on the one hand, and reality, on the other. The research uses narrative as its method of inquiry. This chapter sheds light on an issue that brings discomfort to professors and students. A mutual desire for cooperative and horizontal relations is expressed.

The right of individuals to particular privileges or benefits is a natural expectation in any workplace. Yet, the concept and practice of “entitlement” is especially crucial in faculties of education where preservice teachers are being prepared to be fully-fledged teachers. In this context, academic administrators shoulder the responsibility of supporting the “well-being” of faculty members. The purpose of this study is to investigate faculty members' experiences of being exposed to excessive entitlement through the faculty well-being lens. The study group is composed of seven faculty members working in faculties of education at foundation universities (universities funded by philanthropies) in Turkey. Faculty members' narrative accounts related to their exposure to excessive entitlement were analyzed within the framework of three dimensions of faculty wellness: (1) thriving, (2) struggling and (3) suffering. The stories shared in this chapter provide unique insights for faculty members and academic administrators about work–life balance, which contributes to a culture of well-being among student teachers and faculty members.

This chapter presents the lived experience of 10 doctoral students and recent graduates from a North American University, who like graduate students elsewhere, have faced upstream battles against excessive faculty entitlement. The six sections of this chapter, each by different authors, explore how entitlement in the University, is experienced from different perspectives. The first four sections explore the deleterious effects of excessive faculty/teacher entitlement which can lead to competitiveness, selfishness and aggression. Section five focuses on student entitlement as experienced by an immigrant graduate teaching assistant, and section six explores how both faculty and student entitlement may be experienced at different stages of the immigrant experience. It is hoped that this chapter will create a platform with which to highlight these topics for ourselves and other doctoral students attending other universities, so that relationships and opportunities may improve for everyone.

Entitlement is a remote research topic in South Africa. Even further remote is the idea of teacher educator entitlement being a topic of academic inquiry. In this chapter, we report a self-study of a teacher educator's experiences and interactions with her students, in which the construct of entitlement was used as an interpretative lens. The data consist of narratives constructed from journal entries based on teacher educators' experiences collected over 12 years. Findings from this case study point to the prevalence of teacher educator entitlement, which manifests itself in different forms. Investigations need to be broadened to establish its reach and the underlying causes of entitled attitudes and behaviours among teacher educators, and how such behaviours impact professional practice and professional growth.

The teaching profession calls for professionals who are theoretical, pedagogical and critical as they influence teaching, learning and the reconstruction of schools. One of the “myths and legends” about teachers is that they are mostly interested to hear about practical ideas for their teaching and often resist theories behind their practice or theoretical analysis. If they do not take a stance towards education or are not aware of where they stand, their behavior or actions can manifest in ‘excessive teacher entitlement’ as a response to unreasonable demands or pressure. In this chapter focus will be centered on how teachers and educators inquire into practice and professional capacities in order to recognize their identities, roles, and pedagogical and theoretical background. This chapter's purpose is to understand the complexity of supporting teachers to create their agency and to find ways to support them in their transition.

Excessive teacher entitlement results from interactions between and among social, institutional and individual elements. This study retrieves small entitlement stories of two teachers and one school principal from an online elementary teacher community in China. Through burrowing into the narrative data, this study presents how the three participants' selves are revealed in their interactions with different community members. The multi-layered relationships between entitlement, reflection, unknown self, personal/professional experiences, and teacher community are discussed. This study provides insights into how administrators, teachers and other educators can collaborate to foster teachers' self-understanding, with the purpose of ameliorating excessive teacher entitlement.

We started our exploration of the notion of excessive teacher/faculty entitlement with the metaphor of digging. In this final chapter, we assemble the major themes that the international scholars in this book unearthed. This comprehensive review helps us take stock of where we started (came from) and to position us where we are at. It also opens up for further consideration where we are going. A plotline emerges for thinking about teacher support in ways that eschew entitled feelings and promotes a beneficial sense of self-esteem, moral value and professional responsibility that needs nurturing as new challenges in the field unfold.