Psychological empowerment as a predictor of quality in training – a glance at the Portuguese context

This paper analyses the model of Adult Education and Training (AET) in Portugal, taking under consideration the two available reports on this recent domain, which reveal that empowerment is a prescriptive goal. However, this construct continues to be ill defined. The empowerment theory suggested by Zimmerman and colleagues, particularly the psychological empowerment construct, shows enough consistency with the AET model to consider that it might contribute to the management of quality in training. These reports also state the urge for better, more inclusive and more reliable measures in assessing quality in training. Contributions of the empowerment theory to this matter are discussed, attempting to analyse and operacionalize it in this specific domain. Key-words: Empowerment Psychological Empowerment Adult Education and Training – Assessment Quality in training. Psychological Empowerment as a predictor of quality in training – a glance at the Portuguese context

recently been put into practice in Portugal, aiming to organise interventions that «focus on social justice and wish to promote equal opportunities and participative citizenship». (Canelas, 2002: 11). These goals can only be achieved through very specific and original training characteristics, "in a perspective of construction of new social relations, interactive and empowering, able to provide those adults the opportunity to build their own personal and professional projects." (ibid. : 12). First and foremost, AET's philosophical and epistemological arguments rely on the notion of competencies (general, vocational and keycompetencies). Based on this, the essential "prescriptive" documents that regulate training are the Key-Competencies Framework, which leads to a process of Recognition and Validation of Prior Learning (RVPL) and the Vocational Training Framework, both articulated in the same process.
Training begins with an initial process of gathering and exploration of self-reports and evidences that result from learning in various contexts, where the participant recognises and validates his/her lifelong learning, followed by individual training, (re)constructed around the participant's needs. The specific structure of these courses is shown in Table 1: Table 1 -Structure of AET courses 3 In this training structure, there is a prominent figure, the mediator, who's present from the beginning till the end of the training process, accompanying trainees and trainers, articulating 3 Cf. Canelas (2002: 19

LIFE THEMES
Transversal area in the curriculum which themes, selected from the interaction between local and global worlds, inform and organise the approach in the different key-competencies areas.
resources and community organisations as well as giving feed-back to the promoting entities.
This leads to another important feature in the AET processes, which is the centrality of the pedagogical team, responsible for the complex task of putting into practice the concepts of such a compound training system.
Another specificity of AET is related to the process of assessment in AET courses, as referred in Figure 2.
One final aspect of AET is the particular importance given to the community in which the training takes place -whether building learning relationships, trading know-how and experience with relevant organisations in the community, or the impact of having more qualified, participative and critical individuals in the community. The AET model aims to evolve people, entities and the larger community, taking into account their very own specificity. In a way, we could say that AET could create "settings that promote communal and personal stories and [permit to] listen more carefully to the voices telling those stories" (Perkins & Zimmerman, 1995: 571), therefore constituting an empowering intervention.

Assessing practice(s) -The reports on AET
The two available reports on the AET training that took place in Portugal, between the years 2000 and 2003 Canelas, 2004), essentially show qualitative data such as the regional characteristics of the AET courses' Portuguese offer, the profile of the pedagogical team, the RVPL process and the curricular construction, assessing the opinions of different actors through questionnaires and regional reports. The representativeness of the sample wasn't an issue, since the objective of these questionnaires was to "draw the AET's universe" (Canelas, 2004: 34). The total number of respondents taken into analysis (trainers, mediators, trainees and promoting entities) was about 4595 (ibid.). Results show that interventions based on this model are growing in number and in importance. One of the findings shows the particular social characteristics of the participants in the AET courses: adults from disenfranchised groups (particularly those benefiting from state minimum income) and unemployed active adults (ibid.: 38), thus urging for the reflection on adapted methodologies for these populations. One other result indicates that women are more represented than men (about 80%, concentrating on the ages of 25-34) (ibid.: 39), suggesting that the first are more available to take these qualification opportunities.
As far as the curriculum is concerned, the "Life Themes" area was considered the most effective, becoming the most participative "place", as reported by trainees, contributing to their involvement and interest in training, while collectively deciding local relevant themes to work. We can also observe that all aspects referring to the curricular planning and development tend to generate trainees' participation, independently of the area concerned (ibid.: 91).
Results show that the RVPL process is considered as a very positive experience, characterised by the specificity of occurring mostly in individual sessions, which gives trainees the opportunity to assume responsibilities and feel motivated towards the learning process (ibid.).
However, the major difficulties reported by the respondents were in articulating the results of the RVPL process and the "General Training", due to the novelty and complexity of the training model. This also happened in the evaluation of the "Learning with Autonomy" classes.
"Vocational Training" is considered a major strength of the training process and it's the participants preferred area (namely to the younger participants in the B3 option), probably This theory has been contributing significantly to the understanding and operationalization of this yet ill-defined construct. One of the first issues that the nomological network of empowerment addresses is the distinction between empowerment values (that theoretically support the programmes), empowering processes (designed to promote opportunities of empowerment development) and empowered outcomes (as result of empowering processes), which we explain in Figure 3:  Concerned with issues like health, adaptation, competencies and natural helping systems, implying a relationship between professional and trainer in which the first becomes, himself, an empowering element.

EMPOWERING PROCESSES:
Mechanisms that lead individuals, organisations and communities to gain mastery over issues that concern them, develop critical awareness about their socio-political environment and participate in decisions that affect their lives. .

RESULTS:
Consequences of empowering processes, relating to the psychometric measures that assess the interventions' results (at different levels of analysis).

Community Level:
Collective action in order to improve life quality in a community and the relation between different community organisations and entities.

Level:
Processes that enhance members' participation and improve organisational efficacy.

Individual Level:
Personal perceptions of control, critical awareness of the factors that guide personal efforts to exert control over one's life and participation with others in order to achieve goals.
We can observe that «participation or provision of opportunities to participate are common themes across each level.» (Zimmerman & Warschausky, 1998: 6). On the other hand, it is suggested that empowerment is related to three different dimensions: participation, critical awareness and control, within each of the three levels of analysis (Zimmerman & Zahniser, 1991;Zimmerman, 2000).
Finally, the theoretical model of psychological empowerment (Zimmerman et al., 1992;Zimmerman, 1995;Zimmerman, 2000), as a dimension of the individual level of analysis, postulates three componentsintrapersonal, interactional and behavioral, which composition we can observe in Figure 5: We could say that the relevance of psychological empowerment in the context of AET is essentially related to the nuclear position of the trainee as the essential element around which the curriculum and the pedagogical options are built . The participant is seen as someone carrying significant experiences and learning, which cannot be ignored in the training process, thereby bringing into the training the raw material to be explored, developed and formally recognised in the process. This emphasis on the individual that the AET model states to privilege, leads us to assume that psychological empowerment is the most appropriate construct to explore when analysing the impact of this specific training model. Bonnet (2004:181) argues that "latest developments in th European Union must surely imply that subsidiarity in education is taking on a new meaning", reflecting the emergence of a global worry on human development through training. But, even though training is considered to virtually be the answer to most of our modern problems, the evaluation of these processes is far from answering the big questions: What are the real effects of all this training? What is

Empowerment and Education
Despite some attempts to study empowerment empirically,some work has been done on the development of sound measures that try to capture the real expressions of this construct in the education domain. Frymier and Shulman (1994), report a scale adaptation and validation study, in which they composed a "learner empowerment scale". The authors recognised that empowered students were more prepared to undertake challenges and perform with quality, and competence (sense of personal qualification and capability to perform actions in order to achieve goals) . Considering the empowerment as a mediating variable, between exogenous (immediacy behaviours and self-esteem) and endogenous (learning) variables, the results of this study showed that "the intervening empowerment variable was a significant predictor of learning." (ibid.:18). However, the authors alert to the fact that a greater distinction between empowering contexts and empowered students should be made in order to clarify the construct.
The most recent study on the impact of the AET model in adult development comes from Amorim (in press), revealed gains in adults' vocational development and less personal alienation, which might lead us to finally relate to the psychological empowerment construct.

Psychological Empowerment as a predictor of quality in training
When we talk about quality in training, we refer precisely to the consistency between prescriptive goals and real outcomes, more than to the actors' satisfaction or other descriptive dimensions. In fact, this is what has been missing, both in empowerment theory, as far as empirical studies are concerned (Zimmerman, 1995;Zimmerman, 2000) and in the AET domain, requiring new forms of assessment Canelas, 2004).
As we can observe, empowerment is a construct consistent with the AET model's values and processes. The reports on which this paper has relied, however, show very few about how these values and processes have actually had an impact on each AET participant, i.e., no psychological empowerment measures have been analysed in the reports. We can admit that some interesting dimensions have been captured like motivation, participation in specific activities, preferences, and some articulation between social characteristics like age, sex, social status (derived from the funding of each course) has been made, however, that is not enough, which lead us to elaborate a new research scheme for assessment in AET: We observed that the AET model, despite its consistency, in what prescriptive goals are concerned, with Zimmerman's theory of empowerment, lacks further analysis on the articulation between goals, processes and outcomes. We have also observed the difficulties in assessing training programs and defining the most accurate measures to do so. Our project, though predictably difficult, is to develop not only sound measures, but also fundamented reflexions, that can help us answer the questions aroused in this paper.