“Empowerment is a vastly overused word in adult education,” says Linda Evans, of the University of Wales, Bangor, in her paper “Educating Adults - Transforming Communities”.
She then uses the words “empowerment”, “disempowered” and “empower” a total of 14 times in just two pages of her paper, as in the following nugget: “A case study will show how, through creative, committed, equal and empowering partnership working, a group of learners in Blaenau Ffestiniog are beginning to effect change in their own community.”
If the word is “vastly overused”, I suspect that’s only the case among educationists and academics.
If it is any comfort, I understand the word hardly comes up at all in the bus stop queues of Blaenau Ffestiniog - or anywhere else.
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