Explores curricular ways to empower students in their learning by creating opportunities for leadership and group collaboration. Contends that drama, particularly role drama, provides opportunities for students to step outside the classroom and investigate imaginary and real worlds of power, responsibility, issues, relationships, and community.…

Traced development of a bilingual curriculum in a monolingual private school in Cali, Colombia, with particular reference to the creation of a curricular proposal in accord with the philosophy and expectations of the school community and the process of particular empowerment generated throughout the research. (Author/VWL)

Argues that teachers can determine the instructional frameworks which can empower students to understand more about their own learning. Describes activities (learning logs, directed reading-thinking activities) that develop higher level thinking skills using writing, reading, and reasoning. Concludes that such activities facilitate students'…

Educators embarking on school-based management/participative decision-making report changes in relationships not only between administrators and teachers and between management and unions, but also between teachers and their union. Decentralization means teacher empowerment at the local level, collaborative bargaining, union involvement with…

Analyzes the question of whether mentor teaching, career ladder, and teacher empowerment programs expand teacher opportunities. Describes several such programs now in place in American school systems. Concludes that teachers, teachers' organizations, administrators, and policymakers need to consider the long-range implications of teacher…

Focuses on the limitations of the concepts of empowerment, liberation education, and critical pedagogy. Implies that teachers play an important and largely underdeveloped role as change agents in the empowerment of learners, and provides a framework for understanding what has to happen for individuals to become empowered. (MG)

Through sharing and collegiality, teacher empowerment, and effective leadership, the principal and staff at DeKeyser Elementary School, in Sterling Heights, Michigan, have created a culture for change. The school's cultural elements include Tuesday meetings, planning sessions, schoolwide themes, cross-age teaching, schematic displays, and…

This article contains three sections: (1) a literature review demonstrating that powerlessness is linked to disease and empowerment to health; (2) an exposition of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire's empowering education theory with a comparison to traditional health education; and (3) a case study of an empowering education substance abuse…

Because feelings of inadequacy, limited school background, or preoccupation with basic necessities may prevent parents from communicating with schools, schools should initiate communication. When communication attempts are difficult, other mediating institutions are needed to support and empower the family. These include extended family members,…

Discusses the culturally-based social problems experienced by Hawaiians. Culturally appropriate prescriptions for empowerment are derived from an analysis of historical and current social problems. Describes current movements to reestablish native sovereignty and an indigenous community-based economy. (JPS)

The Kanuhkwene Project, based on a traditional concept of community, was developed by Oneida women to address critical social issues. Kanuhkwene empowers through connection with the social world and the natural world, and is instructive for what it shows about the possibilities of mainstream social services versus traditional Native American…

The important concepts undergirding school-based management are greater budgetary autonomy, district-level support for local school needs assessments and plans, allowed deviations from district normative expectations, better onsite decision-making opportunities, and a total district commitment to instructional and administrative excellence. In…

Recent study of emergent collaborative bargaining processes in several urban school districts charts typical bumpy progression from wrangling to genuine cooperative problem solving among teachers, administrators, and unions. Rules of power game change when one party makes first move toward open communication and trust building, when teachers and…

Numerous studies have used the power metaphor in the physical science sense to describe power in the organizational sense. This paper views school as an electrical distribution system to illustrate how power operates in schools and offers eight lessons for administrators desiring to effect positive empowerment results in school settings. (26…

Milwaukee's African-American Immersion Middle School is designed to negate and/or eliminate the institutional and attitudinal influences impeding African-American students' academic success. Although the school mission will promote an egalitarian view, teachers will be expected and encouraged to draw on African-American students' life experiences.…