Guatemalan teacher empowerment : reaching further than the classroom

Education potentially empowers. The study\u27s purpose is to determine if the USAID Project for Bilingual Intercultural Education (PAEBI) in El Quiché, Guatemala empowers teachers, and to explore the deeper implications of the possible empowerment for the marginalized indigenous people of the Quiché Department. Empowerment provokes growth through experience and knowledge, which allows the person to perceive new options and opportunities that result in behavior that affects the allocation of power and resources. Three components are proposed as possible means to analyze empowerment: intrapersonal component, interactional component, and the behavioral component. The multiple choice and liker scale questionnaire compared the attitudes, perceptions, competencies, values, beliefs, and behavior between trained teachers versus the untrained teachers exposed to trained teachers and the untrained teachers not exposed to trained teachers The implications of empowerment are four-fold: influencing the individual teacher in other life domains, affecting the education quality with the target population, influencing future educational policies in Guatemala, and effecting future work between PAEBI, the Guatemalan Ministry of Education, USAID and World Learning. The change has the potential to influence other domains in addition to teaching specifically attitudes, values, beliefs, and behavior in a ripple effect. The results provide the teachers an opportunity to become conscious of the manner in which they change, creating a greater sense of awareness about themselves and their teaching improving the quality of education for Guatemalan children