Empowering Ourselves and Transforming Schools: Educators Making a Difference

Examines the forces that keep educators and students from feeling fully empowered. Contains self-help and planning activities for teachers and administrators interested in transforming schools.

In this readable and ground-breaking text, Irwin examines the forces that keep educators and students from feeling fully empowered. She defines empowerment as gaining the power to self-actualize and to facilitate this for others. Grounding her arguments in feminist and critical examinations of domination, Irwin begins by defining empowerment as fundamentally opposed to domination. She then examines the implications of this definition for our educational system.

This book encourages the reader to consider new directions for educational reform and synthesizes current innovations under the umbrella philosophy of empowerment, suggesting how the change from the patriarchal paradigm to one based on cooperation and connection might revolutionize the organization of schools and their classrooms. The reader is challenged to develop his or her own philosophy and agenda for change through a series of reflective activities.

A comparative case study of five "empowered" teachers is included to demonstrate that empowerment is an individual as well as a collective process.

Judith W. Irwin is Professor in the School of Education at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of Teaching Reading Comprehension Processes, co-author, with I. Baker, of Promoting Active Reading Comprehension Strategies and is the editor of Reading/Writing Connections: Learning from Research and Understanding and Teaching Cohesion Comprehension.