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Excessive entitlement, the enacted belief that one's voice, opinion, or assessment holds more weight than that of others (even those of one's own kind), and how it unavoidably rubs against their sense of their best-loved self, is the focus of this chapter. Some define excessive entitlement as a kind of greed where individuals in academia elevate themselves and lord their perceptions/stances over others. This work is situated in the academy and involves relationships and situations that arose between and among graduate students and professors as well as between and among professors and other professors. Wedged between conflicting agendas, individuals feel pulled from pillar-to-post as they experience differing phenomena and images playing out within themselves, some seriously challenging their images of the best-loved self. This fine-grained scholarship illustrates that although strides have been made around gender, professional backgrounds, ethnicity, and race in society, room for significant improvement still exists, most especially at the micro-levels where aggressions can still take place. This research reveals intertwined hegemonies in academia. Narrative inquiry – a storied method that unpacks stories – deftly skirts research issues by including fictionalization as a fourth analytical tool, joining the conventional tools of broadening, burrowing and storying-restorying. Using these devices situates the inquiry, burrows into stories of experiences, and illuminates shifts taking place. Truth is established through employing multiple research tools over time and gauging the extent to which the intersecting narratives ring true to those outside the research situation.

This is a narrative inquiry into the phenomenon of teacher retention. Specifically, we study an 18-year teaching veteran’s stories that span her career. We address the question of what sustains her in her profession. We chose to “see big” (Greene, 1995) our teacher participant, Anne, exploring, with her, the particulars of her teaching world, the contextual factors, emotional processes, and her relationship with her administration, subject matter, students. The research opens a view into Anne’s decisions along the way that contributed to her constructing a “story to stay by” (Craig, 2014; Ross & Prior, 2014). Narrative inquiry helped us see big through Anne’s stories. Anne’s best-loved self was closely connected with her professional knowledge landscape. In Anne’s case, her interactions with students, her collaboration with other teachers, and her reactions to the evaluation system stimulated the evolution of her perceptions of herself as a teacher. Therefore, the best-loved self is featured as a dynamic image resulting from continuous interactions between the teacher and other components of the professional knowledge landscape. The teacher’s meaning-making of those interactions, likewise, plays a significant role in shaping his or her image of the best-loved self. Our inquiry into the best-loved reminds teachers that they can cultivate their best-loved selves through personal storytelling that begins with reflection. Anne’s stories of fear, doubt, hope, inferiority, and joy may be important for other teachers. Such reflection may yield further insight into the behaviors and beliefs that encourage and sustain teachers.

This chapter highlights the underlying complexities of the concept of “curriculum” in recent decades and the different definitions given to the concept in curriculum studies by scholars of education in general and ISATT members in particular. After describing the fuzziness of the curriculum concept and seeking to resolve fragmentation through returning to its value and avoiding misunderstandings, this work briefly addresses the “curriculum design” concept and presents some recent developments in ISATT research – “curriculum making” and “vertical curriculum” – that reevaluate the role of teachers. The outcomes of the such investigations converge around teachers' roles as “curriculum makers” and not as mere “implementers”; specifically, they allow explorations of teacher's “best-loved self,” through narratives and metaphors to reaffirm principles – such as decision-making and collegiality – which are necessary for teachers' practices and teaching and teacher education research.

To be a writer, one must write. Research shows when teachers write and identify as writers, they transfer their writing practice into their classroom, positively impacting their students' writing development. Shifting instructional practices or identities requires educators to self-determine a gap in order to take on transformative learning experiences, such as mentoring, professional development, or modeled learning. Often professional development is chosen by administrators for educators to shift their instructional practice, ignoring a teacher's curriculum-maker role, and best-loved self identity. This narrative inquiry analysis details one teacher-writer in a creative writing professional development residency as she supports educators with a goal to transform educators into teacher-writers. This chapter includes the small step successes and systematic struggles the author faced as she modeled the writer's craft and writer's workshop strategies with her teachers. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the important role teachers have to decide, navigate, and discover their own best-loved self-teaching identity.

This chapter is a collection of reflections on the broader concept of my “story to live by” (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990; Craig, 2008, 2014) as a beginning English Language Arts teacher. Burrowing deeply into the impact of a single phrase from a conversation with a found mentor at the close of my first year, the chapter explores the journey of sustaining in the profession by examining what is here within discussed as a narrative undercurrent that carries each educator toward his or her “best-loved Self” (Craig, 2013; Schwab, 1954/1978). This concept is introduced, and then reflected upon in correlation with the development of knowledge communities (Olson & Craig, 2001; Craig & Huber, 2007), narrative authority (Olson, 1995), and narrative identity (Connelly & Clandinin, 1999; McAdams, Josselson & Lieblich, 2006).

In meditating on the broader narrative, I arrived at the conclusion that the conversation referenced initiated my discovering essential elements of my best-loved Self, and my seeking to actualize them within a forged knowledge community. I moved forward and expanded my knowledge “for,” “in,” and “of” practice (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1998). Through this process, I authored and re-authored myself through conflicts noted across the literature as factors contributing to beginning teacher attrition rates (Craig, 2014; Schaefer, 2013) and preserved my story to live by.

“Excessive teacher/faculty entitlement” is a nascent idea in teacher education. Ratnam chanced upon this notion of “excessive teacher entitlement” while trying to understand and find a language to characterize the perplexing paradox of teacher intransigence in the face of the adaptability required of them to address the intensifying issues of equity and diversity in this global multicultural world. The concept of the “best loved self” brought in by Craig as a perfect complement to “excessive teacher/faculty entitlement” helped them present the two in a yin-yang relationship. The authors in the five chapters of this section use the language of excessive entitlement to conceptualise and uncover the sources of oppression experienced by them in the situated dynamics of their institutional milieu. Their narratives tell how the naming of the phenomenon provoked them to become conscious of the presence of excessive entitlement in themselves and others accompanied by a liberating push towards realising their best loved self.

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.

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.

As the novel virus was declared a pandemic, Korean schools quickly transitioned to remote schooling based on its advanced IT system, government-operated digital learning platforms, and an abundance of pre-existing online teaching materials (Byun & Slavin, 2020). Unfortunately, this story of “successful” educational responses to the pandemic was of little relationship to physical education (PE) partly because of the sparsity of supportive resources for online teaching of the hands-on subject area but mainly because of the incompatibility between the nature of the online classroom and the essence of PE (Baek & Yoon, 2020; Oh, 2021). As its name implies, physical education is inseparable from physical movements, bodily dialogue, close physical contact, and active, direct interactions between engaged individuals. Accordingly, PE teachers, dwelling in either online or blended classrooms where bodies are absent, and touch is unthinkable, are experiencing diminished room to implement their pedagogical repertoires and, in turn, affecting their deconstruction and reconstruction of their teacher identities (Kamoga & Varea, 2022). In a nutshell, PE subject matter and PE teachers' identities are being challenged and experiencing unexpected metamorphoses amid this global crisis.