Teacher Empowerment and Cultural Context

The Case of Brunei Darussalam

Shanthi Thomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351400367
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

Teacher empowerment is a psychological and socio-structural motivational process that enhances teacher performance and self-expression. The current conceptualisations of Teacher Empowerment, available in extant literature, have been constructed in an Anglo-Saxon, western cultural context. There have been attempts to transfer the concept to Asian countries, but these attempts were faced with major obstacles since the underlying cultural assumptions are not the same across countries.

This book treads new ground by redefining Teacher Empowerment in the cultural context of South East Asia. Using the case of Brunei Darussalam which has a unique socio-cultural make-up as a melting pot of Malay, Chinese and other Asian cultures, the book offers a unique insight how the Teacher Empowerment dynamics is played out in this context. Covering more than just empowering leadership in schools, the author explores how colleagues, parents, and students empower teachers, and how teachers empower themselves. This book is a valuable guide for educators and educational leaders and researchers in Southeast Asia and beyond, who are committed to the empowerment of teachers, and the qualitative enhancement of the field of education as a whole.

1 Teacher empowerment

Teaching is the core profession, the key agent of change in today’s knowledge society. Teachers are the midwives of the knowledge society. Without teachers, their confidence and competence, the future will be malformed and stillborn.

(Hargreaves, 2003, p. 124)

Andy Hargreaves’s reflections on teaching and teachers highlight the vital facilitative role of teachers in the molding of our human civilization in the 21st century knowledge society (Drucker, 1994). A midwife who is unskilled and unenthusiastic, may well cause the loss of the baby! Or even worse, it could be severely malformed! The analogy paints a rather scary scenario.

Why is this discussion on teachers and teaching relevant now? Teachers around the world have been, and are, going through tough times. Studies around the world indicate that teacher motivation is at an all-time low. There are few countries in the world that pay teachers well. In very few countries is teaching a respected profession. It is the least sought after of the so-called ‘noble professions’ in many parts of the world, excepting rare examples like Singapore. In international tests such as PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), many countries fare poorly, and fingers are pointed unfailingly at the vast teacher force of the world.

This book was born after two decades of my practicing and studying about the teaching profession, as a teacher, as a teacher leader, and as a PhD scholar. My mission was to find out what made great teachers tick, and if there was a formula, what it looked like. I also set out to find why the vast majority of teachers around the world were not so-called ‘great’ teachers. At the outset of this mission, I realized that motivation factors for teachers were different in different parts of the world. What they taught, why and how they taught, and what made them great teachers were not the same across cultures.

Thus, this study was born. In the tiny but magnificent country Brunei Darussalam, I set out to learn what ingredients made a teacher willing to invest his/her best efforts into teaching, and in ensuring learning. In a private secondary school in Brunei, I spent months talking to teachers, observing them in action, and taking part in discussions. What resulted was an insight into the factors, in the unique cultural landscape of Brunei, that brought out the best in teachers. The questions that underpinned the study were: What enabled teachers’ intrinsic motivation and brought out their best potential? What factors brought teachers’ inner power out? In other words, what factors facilitated/caused teacher empowerment?

Conceptualizing teacher empowerment

Empowerment has always been a fuzzy construct. In the 17th century, ‘to empower’ meant ‘to authorize’. This was largely the meaning that held till the beginning of the 20th century. After the 1960s, however, empowerment became a sort of buzzword, and corporate offices began talking about sharing of power with employees as a means to improve productivity. Nevertheless, the focus on ‘power’ was lost by the 1970s. From then on, empowerment began to take on the more humanistic meaning of ‘fostering human welfare’. In management discourses however, employee empowerment is still taken as a means to foster productivity—a means to an end.

However, empowerment is not just of instrumental value. Its intrinsic value has been recognised from time immemorial. Narayan-Parker (2005) asserts that empowerment is an end in itself. “Feeling confident, walking with dignity, feeling respected, living without fear, is of value in itself” (p. 16). This intrinsic value is seen in the philosophical underpinnings of the notion of empowerment, i.e. modern individualism, which upholds the value and uniqueness of the individual (Traynor, 2003).

In education, empowerment was first heard in the works of the Brazilian educationist Paolo Freire, who suggested that the oppressed people of the world could be liberated through education. The focus here was on social, political and economic empowerment, and education was a means to achieve that.

It was in the 1980s that the phrase ‘teacher empowerment’ entered educational discourse and influenced school educational policies in the western education world in remarkable ways. However, the meaning and dimensions of the teacher empowerment construct were not fixed, but evolved over time.

The social structural perspective on empowerment

The first forms of teacher empowerment in the western educational scenario had a social structural nature. The social structural perspective posits that employees at the lower strata of an organization can be empowered through increased access to opportunity, information, support and resources (Spreitzer, 2007). It was thought that teachers were empowered when they were given the power to participate in decision making at the school level. It was known as ‘school site-based decision making’ or ‘School Based Management (SBM)’. According to Caldwell (2005), SBM is “the systematic decentralization to the school level of authority and responsibility to make decisions on significant matters related to school operations within a centrally determined framework of goals, policies, curriculum, standards, and accountability” (p. 11). A less formal variation of SBM is Shared Decision Making (SDM), where principals involve teachers in decision making, bringing democracy to the workplace. Such responsibility for decision making, which calls for greater teacher professionalization, became the hallmark of teacher empowerment. Participation in decision making in school goals and policies as well as curriculum and means of instruction has been equated to teacher empowerment by many scholars in education (Bolin, 1989; Hoy & Miskel, 2012; Sweetland & Hoy, 2000).

The psychological perspective

In the 1990s however, educationists began to question this social structural theory of teacher empowerment. The social structural theory did not account for what happened in the psyche of the individual, and it was found that just by giving teachers decision-making powers, no one could guarantee empowerment. Thus, Thomas and Velthouse (1990) proposed the view that empowerment is not externally engineered, but internally brought about. They proposed that empowerment is the psychological or intrinsic motivation of employees that is generated from the employees’ perception that the job they do makes a difference in the work environment, they have some control over their work, the job they do aligns with their own beliefs and value system, and that they have the ability to do the job with skill. These four perceptions of impact, self-determination/choice, meaning, and self-efficacy/competence together form a ‘gestalt’ (Spreitzer, 1995a) that empower employees to perform optimally at work. This psychological perspective of empowerment as intrinsic motivation was hugely popular at the time and is even now used in several scholarly studies on empowerment. (e.g. Dee, Henkin, & Duemer, 2003; Gardenhour, 2011)

Teacher empowerment as a multifaceted, single construct

In 1992, Short and Rinehart published the results of The Empowered School District Project, a three-year project that studied school empowerment in nine school districts in the United States. They developed the School Participant Empowerment Scale (SPES) based on the study. This scale is an instrument that could be used to measure teacher empowerment in a particular. Short, Greer, & Melvin (1994) defined empowerment as a “process whereby school participants develop the competence to take charge of their own growth and resolve their own problems” (p. 38). The six dimensions of teacher empowerment that were included in this scale were:

1. 1 Involvement in decision making
   1. Involvement in decision making, according to Short (1994), refers to the teachers’ participation in important school-level decisions that affect their work directly. The decision-making areas may include budgets, teacher selection, scheduling, and curriculum.
2. 2 Professional growth
   1. Short (1994) referred to professional growth as the teachers’ perception that the school provides them with opportunities for professional growth and development, continuous learning, and expansion of skills, through the work life of the school.
3. 3 Status
   1. Teacher status refers to the teachers’ perception that they are professionally respected, supported and admired by colleagues and public (Short, 1994). A 1966 ILO/UNESCO Recommendation Concerning the Status of Teachers (5th October, 1966, Paris) defined the status of teachers as “both the standing or regard accorded to them, as evidenced by the level of appreciation of the importance of their function and of their competence in performing it, and the working conditions, remuneration and other material benefits accorded them relative to other professional groups” (pp. 3–4).
4. 4 Self-efficacy
   1. Self-efficacy refers to the teachers’ perceptions that they are competent enough to help students learn. Originally developed by Albert Bandura (1977), the psychological concept of self-efficacy is a person’s belief in his or her ability to accomplish tasks successfully and reach goals.
5. 5 Autonomy
   1. Autonomy refers to the teachers’ beliefs that they are able to control certain aspects of their work life. Thus, it is the freedom to make decisions regarding areas of work such as scheduling, curriculum, textbooks and instructional planning.
6. 6 Impact
   1. Impact refers to the teachers’ perceptions that the work they do has an effect on school life. Feedback and recognition from colleagues and administrators, Short (1994) pointed out, is important to make teachers feel that their work has an impact.

Teacher empowerment as bringing about ‘inner power’/ teacher potential

The above mentioned conceptualizations of empowerment in general, and teacher empowerment in particular, had a measurable, verifiable, no-nonsensical nature. However, towards the end of the 20th century, scholars began to shift to more qualitative notions of what it meant to be empowered. Bernstein (2003), as well as Blanchard, Carlos, and Randolph (1999) thought of teacher empowerment as ‘bringing out the power within’ and ‘realization of human potential’ respectively. The notion is eloquently summed up by Abraham Maslow (1943, as cited in D’sa, 2014):

What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization…. It refers to the desire for self-fulfillment, namely, to the tendency for him to become actualized in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.

(p. 1)

In western philosophy, the roots of self-actualization theory may be traced to Aristotle’s concept of entelechy, a term coined by Aristotle (384–322 BC) to mean ‘self-contained purpose’. The concept is related to ‘enlightenment’, which the philosopher Immanuel Kant described as the release from self-imposed dependence on the guidance of others. In eastern cultures, ‘self-actualization’ is the term used to describe this concept, particularly in Buddhism and similar perceptions of life.

Chang (1991) noted that there are many similarities in the portrayal of the self-actualized individual between Taoism and Zen Buddhism of the east on the one hand, and the theories of Maslow and Rogers on the other hand. However, as Yang (2003) asserted, these similarities do not mean the applicability of Maslow’s and Rogers’s theories on the Chinese and the other people of the east, and that collectivistic self-actualization needs (of eastern cultures) are different from the individualistic self-actualization needs of the western, Anglo-Saxon cultures.

Towards an integrated definition of teacher empowerment

Empowerment in general, and teacher empowerment in particular, are constructs not easily defined. The different perspectives on empowerment discussed in the previous section are but different ways of looking at the same phenomenon, and attempts have been made to integrate these different perspectives. Spreitzer (2007), reviewing more than 20 years of empowerment studies, pointed out that social-structural empowerment operates through psychological empowerment to promote outcomes for the individual. Other scholars (e.g. Lee & Nie, 2014; Spreitzer, 1996; Seibert, Silver, & Randolph, 2004) have corroborated this in the case of teacher empowerment.

Short (1994) observed that the six dimensions of teacher empowerment (of the School Participant Empowerment Scale) included both organizational and personal dimensions, which correspond to social structural and psychological empowerment, as the case may be. Thus ‘status’, ‘respect’, and ‘professional growth’ are part of social structural/organizational empowerment along with shared decision making, whereas ‘self-efficacy’, ‘impact’, and ‘autonomy’ are part of psychological empowerment along with ‘meaning’. Thus, it can indeed be seen that social structural/organizational empowerment works through psychological empowerment to result in positive outcomes for the individual.

Scholars have debated on what these positive outcomes for the individual teacher are. Khales (2015), studying early childhood teachers’ reflective writing, concluded that reflective writing had become a tool for empowerment, as it helped the teachers “know themselves better” and “opened up wide hor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Teacher empowerment
• 2 The cultural context
• 3 The role of school leaders in facilitating and/or impeding teacher empowerment
• 4 The role of colleagues in facilitating and/or impeding teacher empowerment
• 5 The role of students and parents in facilitating and/or impeding teacher empowerment
• 6 Self-initiated empowering and disempowering behaviours of teachers
• 7 Empowering/disempowering values, beliefs and dispositions of the individual teacher
• 8 Teacher empowerment process in the study context vis-à-vis western conceptualization
• 9 A proposed model of self-empowerment and disempowerment
• 10 Implications and recommendations
• Index