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 paper 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. 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 experimental 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.
Continuing the work of S. Freud and J. Lacan’s teaching on unease in civilization, this communication analyses in fact the tensions associated with excessive academic entitlement of teachers to the effects of the vacillations of their unconscious professional identity. We postulate that contemporary science has effects on identity and segregation mechanisms that contribute to a growing teacher unease, of which their excessive entitlement is one of the aspects, blocking for the inclusive attitudes and processes.
Research into teacher education faces many difficulties in addressing the challenges posed by intersubjective activity between teachers and students. Multiple dysfunctions have been observed in the "professional gestures” or “actions” of teachers (Bucheton, 2020), testifying to the problems teachers experience in adapting their professional “gestures” or professional actions to the “postures” they hold. Postures refer to the ethical underpinnings of teachers’ actions, the values, beliefs, and responsibilities teachers hold that positions them in a certain way with respect to their students (Bucheton, 2020). The ethical posture underpinnings teachers’ gestures or actions in the classroom is linked to student engagement and creativity. Desirable postures such as a concern for diversity and social justice are likely to stimulate professional gestures or actions that promote inclusive learning for all students by catering to their differentiated needs (Tara Ratnam, personal communication, November 12, 2020).
Drawing on our experience as teacher educators and researchers in this field, we hypothesize that an "excessive entitlement" in education, including excessive teacher entitlement is counterproductive, not only because it is excessive, but also because it has no place in any rigorous, ethical, and inclusive teaching practice. To support this presupposition, the concept will be analyzed to see if it can contribute to the debate on solutions for educational leadership and research. Having clarified the conceptual framework of entitlement as applied to education, the focus will be on its interest in analyzing the student-teacher relationship, especially when that relationship is difficult. In the second part, entitlement will be examined in an inclusive educational context, where the demand for quality in the educational relationship is even greater. Results of an empirical survey will be explored, fueling this idea that excessive and undesirable entitlement in teachers and an ethical and inclusive professional educational practice are mutually exclusive. The discussion will attempt to demonstrate the extent to which entitlement can prove to be a promising concept, not only for education research but also for a more effective analysis of the day-to-day professional practices of the future inclusive teacher.

Our three-year survey covered three classes of preservice teachers. They were Master's students in teaching, education, and training. A research-action was carried out by a team of four trainers working on the course on inclusive education. As part of a supervised exercise on the difficult situations experienced by trainee teachers and involving students with special educational needs, the trainers started by distributing a questionnaire with five open questions. The aim was not only to collect the students' analyses, but also to allow them to come up with initial representations of the difficult situations experienced by them that could then be worked on during the session. The final corpus consisted of 250 school questionnaires from trainee teachers, mostly secondary school teachers in alternating training, usually with one or two days each week in the field in their classrooms. They were asked to describe a situation that they considered "difficult", giving a precise explanation of the situation that posed a problem to the teacher and the treatment applied, making an initial analysis of the factors that led to this state of affairs. While the survey did not explicitly address entitlement, we hypothesize that it allowed some of its characteristics to be explained as it highlighted the meaning given by the teachers to their practices in a variety of professional contexts. The fact that the survey made no explicit reference to entitlement and that the questionnaire was distributed right at the beginning of the sequence for use as a training material allowed a certain objectivity of the results.

The first results give an indication of their representations of the students and the issues preventing their development. A first set of trainee teachers analyzed the difficult situations mainly in terms of authority and (dis)obedience, with a particular stress on their hierarchical position and the respect that is due to their (entitled) function. They mostly attributed the difficult situations to an individual who was disturbed from a behavioral point of view, namely "dissipated," "not doing the work they were asked to," etc. In short, "a rebel," "a time bomb," "a teenager who's completely out of it," etc.. These terms used by these teachers about the students reflect an extremely negative representation of all behavior that does not correspond to the behavior expected in school. In addition to the intrinsic dispositions and to the moral qualifications mentioned above, such as "laziness" or a "willingness to provoke by playing", because the clinical categories in mental health are themselves problematic, the family factor was mentioned as contributing greatly to the difficulty. These views reveal an imaginary underlying imbalance of power between entitled teachers and learners, which is unsuitable for building inclusive professional gestures. A second set of questionnaires showed psychologizing interpretations: "explosion of a pupil in a situation of nervous tension," "psychiatric problems of one or more pupils in a stressful situation," "pupil in search of identity," etc.. The discrepancy between requested and expected behavior was interpreted here as a sign of a pathology on the part of the individual, but expecting a certain behavior, outcome or situation does not increase the chances of building an inclusive professional style of practice. A sense of entitlement is the opposite to an inclusive way of teaching. When the situation gets bumpy, an entitled teacher feels shocked and angry, dwelling on the unfairness of it all.

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