Empowerment Knowledge, Power, and Culture Term Paper

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For example, students raised in highly literate households will be far more likely to excel in literacy skills than students raised in less literate households or in households in which English is not the first language. Educators disempower their students and themselves when they lose interest in questioning the methods they use or the material they teach. Curriculum that fails to address social ills, glossing over problematic areas of history, is profoundly disempowering. Discrimination, of race or gender, is the most obvious source of disempowerment but blatant discrimination is relatively rare in 21st century American schools. Subtle forms of discrimination remain extant, however.

Impoverished schools cannot hope to empower their students and therefore public policy must change to emphasize education far more in the federal budget. Prioritizing education will endow schools with the power they need to change deplorable social realities such as the growing income disparity in the United States. Researching different methods of teaching students and basing pedagogy more on empirical research than on meeting assessments criteria are also ways schools can become agents of empowerment and positive change.

The role schools play varies according with level of schooling. During early childhood education, empowerment relates more to how teachers set personal examples of the "art of living," (Aloni, 1999). Emphasis is given to developing creative and critical thinking skills, which will later be applied to the difficult social and political issues those same students will encounter later in their education. Educators should always empower their students by showing them how to think, and not what to think. The theories of Dewey and others who emphasize pragmatism and hands-on learning will also empower students to discover knowledge on their own rather than having it spoon-fed to them by disempowerred teachers working within an overly rigid, hierarchical system.

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Learning how to think for themselves, students are profoundly empowered.

Marxist theory offers one of the most universally empowering methods to view the role of schools as social institutions. As Almeida Moraes states, the current education system perpetuates a "bourgeois hegemony," that can only be broken down through the creation of a "new culture." This new, popular culture, is the one that will empower students and teachers in the future. Popular culture itself is a key springboard for educators. Teaching popular culture levels the playing field between teacher and student, allowing students to grasp critical and creative thinking skills in a language meaningful to them. Students empower themselves when they associate education with pleasure: when that which is meaningful to them becomes a learning experience. When empowered, students act confidently and are able to share and express their opinions more readily than when their ideas are dismissed as being pedestrian or not belonging to the elite culture of academia.

Higher education plays a key role in empowering students and future educators. Pedagogy can be transformed at the level of higher education, where teachers and students can engage in a Socratic dialogue that lets them question the social realities in which they live and work. Finally, schools become agents of empowerment when they value diversity. A plurality of voices and backgrounds enhances the character and caliber of schools, which should seek to celebrate, not dismiss, differences......

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