By using group activities for learning, cooperative student effort for school events, and peer pressure for classroom discipline, Japanese teachers involve and empower their students. While American students feel that classrooms are teachers' sacred ground, Japanese students appropriate them as their rightful community. Instead of stressing…

Provides definitions of assessment and evaluation, with particular attention to how each may be used to gauge a program's effectiveness. Offers suggestions for using assessment and valuative data proactively to empower students of color and to effect institutional change. Suggests strategies for implementing effective program assessment and…

Used a qualitative, exploratory investigation of 24 adult caregivers with low incomes to examine empowerment as an outcome of adult participation in a cooperative preschool program. The program succeeded in helping parents attain and maintain self-sufficiency. Analyzes to what extent empowerment is fostered by adult participation in a cooperative…

A Massachusetts regional high school that was formerly on probation has totally restructured its school day, culture, curriculum, and treatment of professionals. Flex time, offered in exchange for performing building supervision duties, allows teachers more flexibility and control in structuring their professional and personal lives. A more…

Analyzes the evaluation of student feedback to a tutor in the Open University (Great Britain). Discusses tutor effectiveness in supporting individual students; group tutorials; self-help and mutual support by students; formative feedback on written assignments; participatory evaluation; and power relations, including "pseudoempowerment."…

Describes a practical supervision approach in which supervisees are encouraged to use their existing strengths and resources to promote solutions and resolve counseling concerns. (Author/KW)

Shows how community service learning is significantly enriched when students use reflection as a context in which to understand and learn from past experience and to prepare future action. Discusses the five stages of most projects which create opportunities for reflection. Includes a discussion on how reflection is, and can be made, an integral…

Moving race from the margins of research paradigms entails a deconstruction of "Whiteness" as the norm against which all "others" are measured. Researchers must stop hiding behind scientific neutrality and being indifferent to how findings are used. To engage in emancipatory research, we must engage in the process of…

Education level, computer ownership, and technology and information access determine one's status in the new information economy. Interventions such as community computer networks, telecommuting centers, grassroots electronic commerce, and volunteer technology corps can help Latinos and other marginalized groups overcome continued disadvantage.…

Considers how literature can showcase the essence of relationships that enable and support characters as they develop voice, introspection, and the inner strength needed to transcend cultural and societal expectations. Presents a cluster (a group of novels, poetry, picture books, and nonfiction on the same theme) that provides readers with models…

A study involving 14 preschool children (7 with disabilities) found that the children with disabilities were provided with more choices than the children without disabilities. Children both with and without disabilities, however, initiated choice making opportunities at the same rate. Female children were provided with more opportunities to make…

The president of Frontier College (Canada) uses examples from the program to elaborate the central philosophy of student-centered, individualized learning. Basic points are that labels often prevent marginalized people from making contributions and that literacy should be a tool for empowerment and inclusion in the community. (SK)

This article describes a community-based approach to health promotion planning and intervention implemented by the Health Promotion Resource Center at Morehouse School of Medicine. The community organization and development model implemented was designed to empower an urban Black community neighborhood to become more self-reliant in addressing…

Literacy by itself cannot change oppressive conditions. It can only be an instrument in the struggle against social, economic, and political oppression. Examples of literacy as a political act may be found in the work of Paulo Freire and in projects that follow the tradition of the Highlander Folk School. (SK)

Teacher empowerment can be better appreciated if viewed as professionalization, rather than an exercise in worrying about who the boss is. This article discusses three guiding principles toward empowerment (status, knowledge, and access to decision-making), separate needs and vantage points of teachers and administrators, and teacher autonomy.…