Teacher Empowerment

Teacher empowerment is a concept with many contested meanings, but the term initially took hold as an antidote to the dominant teacher-as-clerk model. It signaled an attempt by school people to professionalize teaching in the sense of recognizing teachers as experts in the craft and content of teaching, teachers as best able to generate and uphold teaching standards, teachers as most responsible for classroom practice. Teacher empowerment is meant as well to protect teachers from interference from mindless bureaucrats, ambitious politicians, and ideologues of every stripe.

Of course, this does not settle the matter, because teaching in a democracy does indeed require dialogue, conversation, and contestation between teachers, parents, communities, politicians, and the widest possible public. Teachers in this circumstance cannot be entirely free agents, doing their thing in a bubbleimagine, for example, a racist teacher or a homophobic teacher. Still, the idea of teachers struggling not so much for absolute autonomy, but for recognition, dignity, and the value of their unique position and knowledgein the mix with all the other actorsis what teacher empowerment has generally come to signify.

Teacher empowerment requires teachers to commit to the task of continuous experimentation, investigation, inquiry, and study, to negotiating the troubled waters of teaching, to growing and learning for an entire lifetime in the classroom. It requires that teachers create a space for problem posing and problem solving, historical and theoretical considerations, storytelling, and critical reflection.

Too often teachers have experienced little in their own training beyond a few courses in educational philosophy and psychology, the history of education, then the methods of teaching, and finally a synthesizing moment when everything is theoretically brought together in student teaching. Critics contend that this approach structures the separation of thought from action, rips one from another, and walls the mind off from the body, weakening both. From this perspective, this approach is lazy at best, miseducative always. But worse, it ignores the humanizing mission of teaching, and the intellectual and ethical heft teachers need to develop if they are to be powerful and wise people in the classroom. Proponents of teacher empowerment argue that the message of the existing curriculum tells teachers what is to be valued and whyit stresses the mindless and the soulless rather than attending to the ethical and intellectual dimensions. It prepares them for life in factory-style schools.

Teacher empowerment, however, assumes that there is no simple technique or linear path that will take teachers to where they need to go, and then allow them to live out settled teaching lives, untroubled and finished. There is no promised land in teaching, just that aching persistent tension between reality and possibility.

Empowered teachers must figure out what they're teaching for and what they're teaching againstagainst oppression and subjugation, exploitation, unfairness, and unkindness, perhaps, and toward freedom, enlightenment and awareness, wide-awakeness, protection of the weak, cooperation, generosity, compassion, and love.