Empowerment courses – content, management and work

entity. At the outset, the instructors were seen as professionals who knew their work and were asked to suggest materials, after the subject and the method of implementation requested by the Authority were clarified to them. The instructors turned on their own initiative to the advisors or the advisors sought instructors they knew from previous occasions. The Authority did not submit a list of suitable instructors who would be capable of realizing the project's goals or offer guidelines regarding the desired content. The work methods were derived from the instructors' personal experience that was based on their professional backgrounds.

The programs that were submitted by the instructors were examined according to the titles and sessions headings, the workshop outlines (if there were such) or the pages distributed as part of the workshops.

4.2.1 Content

The female empowerment process should be re-examined through the content and subjects of the various empowerment workshops, in order to seek ways "to realize authentic female empowerment that empowers and strengthens the leadership abilities and female influence" (Cohen 2006:89).

Authentic observation of the courses held by this researcher raised two main types of empowerment – direct empowerment, as she terms it, whose first goal was developing personal female awareness that would lead to motivating change or developing conceptualization; and the courses she terms indirect empowerment intended to develop a defined skill, whose acquisition leads to a feeling of capability or concrete empowerment.

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4.2.1.1 The content of courses for direct empowerment The programs offered entailed:

1. A different course structure – the duration and number of sessions varied between 10-16 weekly sessions and the number of hours per session ranged between 3-4 academic hours¹⁸²

2. Workshops - a key component that characterized these courses and offered participant tools (conversation, discussion, story), activating the participants (rather than passive participation) which emphasizes the values of informal education.

The courses varied between the procedural type in which the emphasis is placed on the participants' behavior and development, and the (more common) eclectic type – a linked collection of issues perceived by the instructors as connected to women, or to the world of content of leadership/female empowerment (including lectures on general information a sort of a short brief such as medical, legal, communications political topics, etc)

In most courses the plan submitted was based on content and tools that had been used by the instructor previously. The fact that "…I don't have ready instructional plans for all things…" testifies to an intuitive, rather than a focused, approach of several instructors based on materials gathered from diverse sources. They sometimes lacked suitable adaptation such as male grammar in the written and oral material, adopting dichotomous theories and the use of male symbols (the triangle-pyramid scheme, the square divided into four etc).¹⁸³

3. Assessment - the sole assessment tool used was feedback, usually conducted on the course conclusion.¹⁸⁴ Feedback was provided in two ways: Written questionnaires that differed from each other (open, closed, question style and topic) and oral feedback- an open and broader question, presented for starting a conversation/

discussion. The oral feedback was conducted from time to time as a technique of shared work in each session (its start or finish the session and sometimes both).

182Workshops lasted 45 minutes; an instructor sometimes agreed to teach for a full clock hour

183 This researcher remembers suggesting to the instructors to use parallels such as a trimmed cone instead of a pyramid, a fan as an alternative to a triangle and of course, a circle within a square divided into four.

184 The researcher does not have all the feedback questionnaires since instructors did not always leave her a copy. At her request, interim feedback sheets were distributed in some cases; and in some courses, with the instructors' agreement, feedback sheets were distributed each session but they were not handled systematically. The feedback content was partially altered by the researcher. Their analysis affords part of the products of this study

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However, the researcher does not know if the content in this type of feedback was noted down by the course instructors, nor has she any information regarding the way in which the feedback was used by the instructors in later courses. The researcher did not know if the information from the feedback was conveyed to the organizers, or in our case, the advisors, and at what level of information. From the moment she began to study the subject this was one of the key areas in which she intervened and devoted time to its examination, as she did to gathering and analyzing the feedback questionnaires.

The content, the continuum of topics and the subject of each session were not identical¹⁸⁵ despite the identical definition of the courses as empowerment courses for women.

In most of the course programs, use it is has been made of eye-catching, but very generalized, titles such as "From dream to reality" for example.

It was a very popular one, used by many instructors, including those who did not participate and lead workshops in the project studied. Another popular title was 'Maximizing personal potential' and so on. The titles were somewhat metaphoric such as 'Journey', 'Best foot first' , "Golden keys to winning communications" and so on.

The titles did not define content. Further written explanation is only given on demand; explanations about intentions were usually provided orally.¹⁸⁶

Investigating the realization of the intentions or written explanations was found to be problematic since when holding the workshop, the management was influenced, amongst other things, but immediate situations of a group or an individual participating (the actual element of the informal education mentioned). Another difficulty was in verifying the intention to implement stemmed from the fact that when holding a workshop only the instructor and the participants attended.

The connection between empowerment and leadership, as a procedural, rather than an alternative situation (Cohen 2006) was found to be one of the points worthy of discussion.

185 See appendix C,D item 1, 2 for comparative table

186 The feedback studied after the course indicates disparity between that which was written as expected issues and what was conveyed in practice. Claims were also voiced of not discussing or completing discussion of a topic due to processes that occurred in the workshop or other reasons.

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Exploration of the names of courses offered by the advisors in flyers distributed for registering therein, found titles such as: 'Empowerment and community leadership from the female angle'; 'Empowerment and leadership'; 'Female empowerment a workshop on business entrepreneurship and business management'; 'Leadership and female empowerment' or titles that included empowering attributes such as ' The women at the center', recognizing female abilities 'Women in their own right '; and even differentiation between stages or types of leadership, 'Personal and community empowerment ' .All the titles were provided without consultation between the advisors, each of whom chose a name independently and intuitively but pointing for a connection between them This writer believes that exchanging the word 'empower' with the word 'leadership' or seeing them as identical underlay the mistake approach of the initiators and course instructors, that was manifested in organizational demands -holding eight sessions of which six were frontal for an audience of 100 participants, and as regards the expected products - producing community projects.

Examination of the context found three main domains that characterize it:¹⁸⁷ Information–knowledge, skills, other¹⁸⁸. By isolating key words in the workshop titles, three main topics were found that are compatible with the area examined in the programs:

a. Leadership – management or empowerment b. Communications

c. Self-awareness, personal female identity and personal development Examination of the participants' feedback on the domains and topics below is as follows:

187 See table in appendix C and D

188 "Other" refers to creating atmosphere that will enable openness and partnerships and that will raise diverse issues from the female experience, discussed in the group at various levels and according to the instructor ( task-oriented, flowing, integrative..)

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