Toward Just Educational Renewal: Addressing Excessive Teacher Entitlement by Reclaiming Spaces for Play

• In Event: Disrupting School Discipline and Teacher Entitlement With CHAT

Abstract

This study uses the new lens of “excessive teacher entitlement” (Author, 2021; in press; Author and Craig, 2021; in press) to understand what constrains teachers from realizing their democratic aspirations of wanting to serve all students within just educational renewal where students are given the voice they are entitled to in their learning. Informed by Vygotsky’s work on the developmental importance of play (Vygotsky, 1933/1967, 1930/2004) the study uses a live case of teacher learning, to submit that excessive teacher entitlement can be addressed by awakening 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.

Author

• Tara Ratnam, Independent Researcher