Reclaiming Human Flourishing in Teacher and Leadership Education: Addressing Cultures of Incivility in Higher Education

In this chapter, we advocate for centering teacher and leadership education on human flourishing, emphasizing positive emotions, engagement, and meaningful relationships as essential to professional formation. We critique the normalization of incivility in academic settings, often disguised as intellectual rigor, which erodes self-esteem, productivity, and collegiality and which worryingly instills cultures of incivility and bullying. We examine the neoliberal pressures shaping academia, where competition, performative culture, and metric-driven evaluation undermine faculty morale and student development. Through a vignette, the deep emotional toll of bullying and incivility is explored, illustrating how toxic environments leave lasting scars and hinder professional growth. While individual well-being practices are valuable, we argue that systemic change is necessary to address the broader toxic culture in educational institutions. We also advocate for teacher educators to be reflexive about the cultures we are both working within and creating. Future educators and leaders require environments that model caring, democratic cultures, and that integrate empathy, respect, and community over competitiveness and efficiency. Ultimately, we propose a cultural rewiring of higher education, fostering inclusivity and explicitly aligning academic structures with the core values of education beyond rhetoric to lived practice. By reclaiming human flourishing in teacher and leadership programs, we aim to inspire transformative change that sustains individuals and strengthens learning communities.