Understanding the Pervasive Phenomenon of Excessive Teacher Entitlement for Just Educational Renewal

• In Event: Excessive Entitlement: A Fresh Perspective in Research Toward Just Educational Renewal

Abstract

Purpose
In this presentation, I use narrative self-reflectivity as a tool to uncover the hidden creative potential in my story of excessive entitlement as a teacher and teacher educator for just educational renewal. Excessive teacher entitlement is defined here as an unawareness that made me assume a position of authority and exert control over students and teachers against the democratic values I held. The “living contradiction” (Whitehead, 1989) I experienced in the early part of my career as a teacher in India was a gap between my intention to help the culturally diverse students ‘learn to learn’ and my practice, which seemed to alienate them from me and the process of learning. Trying to understand this inconsistency between my aspiration and practice made me question: Who am I as a teacher and what are the contexts in which I developed my teaching and learning? How should I change what I do to connect to my students?
Perspectives
The process of developing self-realization took me back to my roots. I follow Vygotsky’s “genetic” framework of inquiry where questions “about what mental life (the “psyche”) is cannot be separated from questions about how human mental life becomes what it is” (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 54).
Method
The autobiographical nature of a teacher’s assistance in promoting learners’ self-authorship makes narratives a convenient vehicle for examining the self and how the development of the self proceeds (Author, 2016). Using Bakhtin’s (1981) concepts of utterance, voice and ventriloquation as analytical tools I illustrate how my self is partly constructed in the interrelation between represented content and interactional positioning (Grumet, 1991) of my autobiographical narrative.
Data sources
I draw on my past using narratives of experience aided by my journal writings. Data from two audio recorded and transcribed classes and my field notes were used qualitatively (Miles, Huberman &Saldana, 2014) for comparative analysis of the two classes.
Findings
My journey to the past to understand my living contradiction helped me see the ‘settled perspectives’ I was socialised into in the missionary school I studied. The socialization into ‘colonised’ ways of thinking had silently bred an attitude excessive self-entitlement. It made me help myself to the position of a knower in my relationship with my students and limited my appreciation of what was meaningful to them, their language and culture. This turned them away from me.
My quest into my erased indigenous identity and an awareness of the excessive entitled attitude that had silently crept into me helped me expand my sense making to see teaching and learning from a new dialogical (Bakhtin, 1981) perspective to give voice to students and connect to them.
Significance
This presentation identifies “excessive teacher entitlement” not only as an obstacle to just educational renewal but also as a potential tool for promoting the regenerative process of educational renewal. This is based on the submission made here that it is only through acknowledging one’s excessive entitlement that one can begin to move toward greater understanding of the self motivating positive change.

Author

• Tara Ratnam, Independent Researcher