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Citation
reference: Harvey, L., 2004, Analytic Quality Glossary, Quality
Research International, http://www.qualityresearchinternational.com/glossary/
This is a dynamic glossary and the author would welcome any e-mail
suggestions for amendments or additions.
____________________________________________________________________
Empowerment is the development of
knowledge, skills and abilities in the learner to enable them to control and
develop their own learning.
explanatory
context
Empowerment, or empowering students,
takes various forms (Harvey & Burrows, 1992).
First, empowering students is equated
with student evaluation. Students are invited to provide their views on the
content and organisation of the programmes of study on which they are involved.
These are fed back into the day-to-day management and teaching of the programme
and into the longer-term strategic plans. Some institutions require that
student evaluation reports are included in annual course reports and review and
validation documents.
Second, empower students by giving them
more control over their own learning. This ranges from allowing students to
select their own curriculum to students entering into a learning contract. The
selection of a curriculum usually means, in practice, choosing which teaching
programmes they attend and thus which assessment they undertake. While
superficially liberating this does not necessarily empower the student. An
unstructured collection of small units, which the student selects from a large
array of available options, with little or no guidance, may not empower as it
may lead to accumulation of credit
with no identifiable progression towards empowerment of the learner. Using a
learning contract, while apparently more restrictive, has a much greater
potential to empower students. The student does not simply choose which
teaching programmes to attend but negotiates a learning experience. With the teacher who acts as
facilitator.
Third, a student charter empowers
students, as like any other Ôconsumer charterÕ, it sets out expectations and
obligations in a transparent way and thus gives students a greater say about
the nature and purposes of higher education as a whole. There are various ideas
of what such a charter should involve and these reflect various degrees of
student empowerment. The weakest is the charter as a set of expectations about
teacher performance (usually set by management) that students monitor. A
stronger version is the charter as an independent kitemarking body monitoring
basic provision within programmes, such as seminar facilities, library,
information technology and personal tutorial provision. However, it is
debatable whether these ÔwatchdogsÕ empower students. They react to, rather
than inform, educational policy. A strong version of a charter would go beyond
the classroom and give the ÔconsumerÕ power to effect changes in institutional
or even national provision.
Fourth, students are
empowered by developing their critical thinking, or metacognition. This
requires an approach to teaching and learning that goes beyond requiring
students to learn a body of knowledge and be able to apply it analytically.
Metacognition is about encouraging students to challenge preconceptions, their
own, their peers and their teachers. To question the established orthodoxy
rather than swallow it unthinkingly. To develop their own opinions and be able
to justify them. Metacognition encourages students to think about knowledge as
a process they are engaged in. Not some ÔthingÕ they tentatively approach and
selectively appropriate. Metacognition is about students having the confidence
to assess and develop knowledge for themselves rather than submitting packaged
chunks to an assessor who will tell them if it sufficient or ÔcorrectÕ.
Metacognition requires students to self assess, to be able to decide what is
good quality work and to be confident when they have achieved it. In short, an
approach that encourages metacognition treats students as intellectual
performers rather than as compliant audience. It transforms teaching and
learning into an active process of coming to understand. It enables students to easily go beyond the narrow
confines of the ÔsafeÕ knowledge base of their academic discipline to applying
themselves to whatever they encounter in the post education world.
analytical
review
Panitz and Panitz (2004) state that:
the empowerment of students produces an
environment which fosters maturity and responsibility in students for their
learning. The teacher becomes a facilitator instead of a director and the
student becomes a willing participant instead of a passive follower.
Hewer (1999) in relating empowerment to
studentÕs use of library resources states:
Empowerment is providing our library
users (students and teachers) with the necessary skills to find and use
information they need for school, study and leisure. Empowerment is a step
beyond the old library skills or user education programs school libraries have
always run. Empowerment doesnÕt just provide users with the instructions on how
to carry out certain library tasks, but equips them with transferable skills
which they can use for all sorts of information retrieval and usage tasks
enabling them to cope with the Information Age.
In another context,
empowerment is addressed as follows:
What is Empowerment?
Empowerment is a continuous process comprising a series of conscious steps
taken by individuals to gain access to economic, educational and health
resources; to better express and defend their rights and in the process, gain
greater awareness and control of the self. Empowerment is not about wresting
power from an individual or group of individuals and handling it over to
another. It is the means to an end, not an end in itself.
Individuals with limited access to
resources and control over their own lives are vulnerable to exploitation and
violence. Within particular societies, women and girls especially have less power
(than men and boys), compounding their vulnerability through unwanted
pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. The process of empowering women
therefore is to tip the unequal balance of power in favour of women whilst
acknowledging men's concerns. This cannot be over-emphasised as the process of
empowering women looks towards support, not antagonism, from men. (Schuler
& Hashemi, 1994)
Harvey,
1999, noted that, in the context of graduate recruitment and the empowering of
employees that:
empowerment means different things in different organisational
contexts. Empowerment can be seen to fall into three broad categories:
Ôself-regulatoryÕ; ÔdelegatedÕ; and, ÔstakeholderÕ approaches.
Self-regulatory empowerment: In many areas, empowerment
appears to equate with the encouragement of self-management which ranges from
Ôtaking a lot of responsibility for your own actionsÕ through to Ôallowing
people who can do a job to manage it themselvesÕ.
ÔSelf-regulatoryÕ empowerment
involves training staff to take on responsibility and to develop a wider set of
organisation-determined competencies. ÔSelf-regulatoryÕ empowerment improves
communication in as much as there are fewer levels to block the flow of
information. Furthermore, a single manager may be responsible for a wide range
of areas in which there are often cross-cutting teams so there is less
departmentalisation to inhibit communication, although the communication down
from strategic-level management may still be inhibited.
ÔSelf-regulatoryÕ empowerment
leads, in theory, to a greater feeling of ownership of the work situation but
in practice, overloading self-regulatory employees or teams with too much work
and responsibility means that they are not able to plan, prioritise, or be
proactive: their whole time is spent meeting the next deadline and feeling
overwhelmed by the number of balls they have to keep juggling at once.
Employees are likely to feel only nominally empowered with little sense of real
ownership and, therefore, exhibit little deep-seated loyalty.
There is a presumption in
some organisations that, with an increase in the number of graduates, the work
force will be sufficiently educated and self-assured to take on the roles formerly
entrusted to intermediate managers.
Delegated empowerment: One manifestation of
empowerment linked to delayering is the delegation of responsibility to
managers to develop appropriate strategies at the local level. Delegated
empowerment provides a good deal of local control and feeling of ownership.
However, it is a limited ownership as delegated empowerment usually involves
providing people with a framework within which to work but leaving them to make
decisions, show initiative and develop ideas, provided they remain within the
parameters.
Stakeholder empowerment: ÔStakeholder empowermentÕ
involves broad-ranging development and training of employees. It sees people as
the key resource in the organisation, one that needs nurturing beyond the immediate
utilitarian requirements imposed by seeing training as an investment requiring
a return.
At one extreme, investment in
employee development and training is seen as investing in the development of
effective critical reflective citizens. Slightly less altruistically,
organisations are seeking to include a range of stakeholders in order to
stimulate ideas, encourage loyalty and develop a culture of communal
involvement in coping with change. The company ethos is communicated to all
stakeholders and innovation is encouraged in a secure environment. Ownership is
embodied in leadership rather than management and is disengaged from formal
structures, being located in team project working.
Stakeholder empowerment is
compatible with a stakeholder-flexible approach in which employees, amongst
others, are given a larger stake and involvement in the determination of the
purpose and direction of the organisation.
In essence, empowerment of
the work force, in whatever form, is about finding ways to actively involve
employees in dealing with change.
The flexibility option and the nature of empowerment provided for
graduates provide the context in which employers seek out the type of graduates
they want.
related terms
sources
Harvey, L. and Burrows, A. , 1992, 'Empowering
students', New Academic, 1, no. 3, Summer, p. 1ff.
Harvey, L., 1999, ÔNew
realities: the relationship between higher education and employmentÕ Keynote
presentation at the European Association of Institutional Research Forum, Lund,
Sweden August. http://www.uce.ac.uk/crq/publications/cp/eair99.html
Hewer, S., 1999, What is Empowerment? School Library Bulletin, 5(5),
Department of Education Library and Information
Centre, Tasmania
Panitz, T and Panitz, P., 2004,
ÔEncouraging the Use of Collaborative Learning in Higher EducationÕ, http://home.capecod.net/~tpanitz/tedsarticles/encouragingcl.htm,
accessed November 2004.
Schuler, S.R. and Hashemi, S.M., 1994,
ÔEmpowering WomenÕ Network Family Health International, 15(1), August. Source: South-South
Collaboration. ICOMP Newsletter on Management of Population Programmes Vol.
XXVIII No. 3&4, 2003 http://www.ffpam.org.my/conn03.asp,
2003 - 2004 Federation of Family Planning Associations Malaysia