Empowering educators: promoting enabling teaching and learning in research and practice

Empowering educators: promoting enabling teaching and learning in research and practice

Teachers and teaching lie at the heart of effective, sustainable and transformative education. Yet teachers across the globe are increasingly experiencing pressure and under siege as the demands on their work increase without a corresponding growth in the resources and support available to them. There is accordingly a significant need to empower educators so that they can in turn continue to empower, inspire and nourish their students to face the challenges and uncertainties of the 21st century.

This chapter places this dual focus on empowering educators in a broader perspective by distilling key findings from contemporary scholarship about teachers and teaching. This scholarship traverses the formally constituted sectors in which educators work as well as the informal spaces that many of them occupy to build collegiality and to nourish their spirits to enable them to fulfil as many as possible of the competing expectations held for their work by governments, communities and employers. Three themes in particular frame the authors’ analysis of these key scholarly findings: the dual character of marginalisation; resilience; and the conditions for sustainable and transformative professional learning for educators.
The authors proceed to link these themes and the wider research findings to which they relate with selected contemporary ‘hot topics’ and ‘wicked problems’ informing current approaches to educational policy-making and practice. The authors evince grounds for cautious optimism in the crucial project of empowering educators on the basis of these issues, provided that the agency and responsibility of individual teachers are not overshadowed by wider structural forces and contradictory pressures.

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