Introduction

What does it mean to empower someone? One way to define it is as:

Developing in learners the power/ability to do something that they could not do before.

Let's breakdown the 3 key phrases within that definition--

Firstly, "developing in participants" this implies a process or series of steps to learn and grow. Often, designers make the mistake of thinking the "space" or challenge alone is empowering. They say "Let them do it on their own" or "let them come up with it". This is throwing participants into the ocean and instructing them to sink or swim. From personal experience I know, half-drowning is not an empowering experience and does not develop your ability to swim. Only a series of steps, with guidance and support, develops new skills and abilities within learners.

Secondly, the definition says "the power or ability to do something". This implies that the participants are learning to do a clearly defined action and will learn clearly defined skills. Often, designers make the mistake of thinking that giving an undefined task for learners to define on their own is empowering.

For example, you may want to 'empower' local government to take action on gender justice in schools. Therefore, you design a training activity in which small groups of government officials design their own gender justice events for schools. Empowering training activity, right? Wrong. Few, if any, of these local officials are gender experts--so do they have the power or ability to design a gender event? Even if you had them spend 20min defining what "gender justice" is, the officials still may have never designed event (so you need to train them on that too) or may have never organized events within schools before (so they need to get skills for that). Furthermore, designing 'an event' is a category of activities not a specific activity. Think of all the questions the officials would have during the group-work: what should happen in this event? which permissions do we need for events? how should an event run? when should it be? how long? do I organize it or head teachers? etc etc... In all those logistical questions, what are the government officials not talking and learning about? Gender! The training activity requires empowerment in lots of non-gender areas which distracts from the officials getting skills on specifically how to promote gender justice in schools. So, a training activity cannot be as simple as "learners figure everything out on their own". This is not empowering. Empowering designs provide specific instructions and target specific skills with a well-defined "something" that participants can do afterward.

Lastly, the definition says "something they could not do before". This implies that you know enough about the learners to know their current status of skills so as to design a learning activity that targets developing new or higher level skills. It is simple: can the participants already do this task without my training? Often, designers make the mistake of 'empowering' people to do a task they already know how to do.

A classic example of this is training teachers on how to write lesson plans. Since their days as a student being certified as a teacher, they have been taught how to write lesson plans. Nevertheless, every teacher training program focuses on it and, with small tweaks to the lesson template, wastes precious training hours 'empowering' teachers to write good lesson plans. Why? Because instead of focusing on "something they could not do before", the designers focus on getting participants to "do the same old thing better". The problem with focusing on "better" is that it is often disempowering. You must tell the learners "your current approach is wrong or not good enough, so we want you to stop doing it your way and do it our way". Yiikes!!

Scaffolding is breaking up the learning into chunks and then providing a tool, or structure, with each chunk. When scaffolding reading, for example, you might preview the text and discuss key vocabulary, or chunk the text and then read and discuss as you go.

What’s the opposite of scaffolding a lesson? Saying to students, “Read this nine-page science article, write a detailed essay on the topic it explores, and turn it in by Wednesday.” Yikes—no safety net, no parachute, no scaffolding—they’re just left blowing in the wind.

In order to meet students where they are and appropriately scaffold a lesson, or differentiate instruction, you have to know the individual and collective zone of proximal development (ZPD) of your learners. As education researcher Eileen Raymond states, “The ZPD is the distance between what children can do by themselves and the next learning that they can be helped to achieve with competent assistance.”

Source: https://www.edutopia.org/blog/scaffolding-lessons-six-strategies-rebecca-alber

Assessment #5:

Final Empowerment Principle Practical:

1. Watch the below short video made by Marit Blaak on the topic of Leadership.
2. Make your own short video about your personal view of Leadership and upload it on youtube.
3. Create one "scaffold" resource for training other designers on how to make short youtube videos. Your scaffold resource can be either a tool/organizer or a process framework (do not create a model/prompt since that has been provided already below).
4. Send your YouTube video link and your "scaffold" resource to designacademy@experienceeducate.org . All your videos will be shown at our next in-person training! :-)

Remember: while you are designing your scaffold, think about what would have made this practical assignment #5 more empowering / skill-building for you.