Addressing Excessive Teacher Entitlement by Regaining Spaces for Play

• In Event: Uprooting Excessive Entitlement: A New Direction in Understanding and Dismantling Racial Injustice

Abstract

Background
The motivation for this presentation is a deeply felt concern: How can we help teachers become conscious of their implicit excessive entitled attitudes that bind them to status quo and develop the flexibility to renew their practice for dismantling all forms of injustice (including racial injustice) by affording equitable learning spaces for all their students? The largely prevalent “theory-into-practice” approach to teacher education tells teachers what they should know and how they should teach based on etic, researchers’ perspective without addressing what teachers know and believe what teaching is from their emic perspective (Author 2010,2020; Göncü & Main, in press). Teachers find it difficult to make sense of the knowledge given to them that is divorced from their lived experience and voice. What seems to be missing in this knowledge transmission approach is the understanding that meaning does not reside in the reified knowledge delivered to teachers, but it is created by teachers in a dialectical relationship between their narratives of lived experience and the knowledge presented to them which makes their “living knowledge” indispensable for transformative learning (Vygotsky, 1934/1987).
Purpose
I focus on excessive entitled attitudes that teachers develop tacitly “as a default strategy to deflect change” (Author, 2021) from a substitutive view of them, where their “personal practical knowledge” (Clandinin, 1985) goes unacknowledged as a resource in their learning. Excessive entitled attitudes ossify teachers’ “sense of plausibility” (Prabhu, 1987)—the space for the play of their imagination and everyday creativity in making sense of new experiences, construing and reconstruing past experiences and imagining possible futures.
Perspective
My study is informed by Vygotsky’s work on the developmental importance of play in childhood (Vygotsky, 1933/1967, 1930/2004) and the extension of this scholarship applied to development across life (e.g., Göncü & Perone, 2005; Holzman, 2009, Vadeboncoeur & Göncü, 2018). According to this sociocultural perspective, although the motive to play, imagine and create runs across life course, it takes shape within the resources and constraints of the social situation in which the individual is engaged in activity with others (Vadeboncoeur & Göncü, 2018). Imaginative play is inhibited in an institutional context where teachers’ “capacity to think and feel,” (Author, 2021) are disregarded.
Method
My qualitative study analyses thematically the opportunities that emerged for a group of five teachers to confront their implicitly held excessive entitled beliefs in alternative spaces I created for them where their sense of plausibility could thrive.
Result
Teachers’ participation in this alternative cultural environment, where I modeled alternative action/teaching practice, involved play—a performing of who teachers were becoming as they engaged in a process of appropriating the new culture in dialectical relation with their held beliefs and practices and creating new meaning and imagining new possibilities for action going beyond who they were (Holzman, 2009).
Significance
The significance of this study lies in illustrating how vital play is in bringing teachers’ tacitly working entitled beliefs to the surface by enabling them to construct knowledge and awareness about themselves and their relationship to the students they teach.

Author

• Tara Ratnam, Independent Researcher