Empowered students empowering the teacher: The cycle of empowerment

Abstract

Empowerment beyond the classroom and academic achievement is a much under-researched area. Situated within the context of speech training for English public-speaking competitions, this paper presents a study conducted in a mainstream secondary school in Hong Kong. Adopting a qualitative case study approach, data is gathered through teacher and student interviews, observations and recordings of speech-training sessions, artifacts of students’ work, learner journals, and the teacher’s field notes. The paper explores the beliefs of the English 'teacher as empowered learner' (Cannella & Reiff, 1994), her pedagogy and teaching practices. Findings of the study shed light on the relationship between motivation and empowerment, as well as between learner empowerment and teacher empowerment. Specifically, factors influencing this mutual empowerment, motivating the learners to come together as “allies” (Chally, 1992) and partners in their active search of ways to empower their teacher in return for an international speech contest, will be examined. The paper redefines the notions of alliance and partnership, and the transformative possibilities of not only student voice (Bain, 2010) but also student-teacher relationship. Implications for how these motivating forces could be translated into teaching approaches in the everyday English classroom will also be discussed.