Advocacy
Teaching Advocacy
By teaching advocacy, students learn how to advocate for themselves, their families, communities, and others around the world who need support. I provide my students with explicit instruction and extensive learning experiences to gives them the ability to advocate in different forms. To embed the idea of student-led advocacy students choose meaningful projects to advocate for.
What is Advocacy?
In order to put 21st-century academic learning into a real-world context, students must be explicitly taught about advocacy. Students will need to develop their skills by seeing problems from different angles and formulating their own solutions. Regardless of the issues they choose to focus on, the ability to think through issues and act is an indispensable tool for advocacy projects and their future. I present students with situations in which they need to figure things out for themselves where skills that they have already developed can be drawn upon to help them figure out a problem. This encourages collaboration and the creation of future ‘citizen leaders’ who make a positive impact on the world around them.
The anchor chart above is a visual I made for my students to help them understand what advocacy means and how they can use it to address issues.
To the left you will see the opening lesson plan I used to teach advocacy to my students.
Issues That Concern Us
Merely encouraging or allowing students to advocate for themselves is not enough. It is my responsibility to engage young people throughout our communities in issues affecting others. This way young people can become part of the conversation.
In my classroom, my students are encouraged to define what they stand for and what they stand against by creating a list of issues they wanted to see change. I believe in a student-centered approach to education. Whenever there is a conversation in my classroom about how we can make things better, it is the students' job to thinking through issues and work together to make real change happen. It is the students' responsibility to decide on issues they want to advocate for. On the left, you will see a list my students created when brainstorming about our latest advocacy project.
To the left, you will see anchor charts my students made to highlight issues they would like to bring awareness to. Even kindergarten students are able to understand issues facing their family and community. Among the most heartfelt statements on these charts were:
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I need a safe place to play.
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I need clean water.
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I need a car for my mom to get around.
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I need homework help.
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My neighborhood needs trash cans.
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My neighborhood needs better schools.
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My neighborhood needs to fix up houses.
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My neighborhood needs recycling bins.
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Tench Tilghman needs more art classes.
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Tench Tilghman needs more tablets.
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Tench Tilghman needs more books.
Collecting Data
Quantitative information is critical to building awareness and gathering support for community issues. My students took the list of issues that they felt passionately about and created a survey. The surveys helped my students collect information on issues. These surveys provide my students with hard data that as a class we can analyze and assess. The survey to the right was used as a tool for comparing peoples views of community issues.
The first data component that my students worked on was giving another set of student their age a survey on topics that may affect them. My students delivered the survey to the other kindergarten class and instructed them on its purpose and how to complete it.
From this survey, world water crisis was rated extremely important. Students in the kindergarten class have experienced water injustice in by living in their community in Baltimore. Lead exposure is high among students in our community. Students have also studied how other lack the access to water. Knowing that a person can not live without water makes my students remarkably passionate about the issue.
"I Can"
Kids are consistently made to think that they cannot do something by educators and parents. Students are not regularly given a choice in what they are learning and are often not informed why they are learning it. With Kiran Sethi's groundbreaking “I can” approach. Students think about problems and how those problems make them feel. Then they must imagine what change would look like and come up with a plan to do something about it. Students are encouraged to transform the world they live in (Sethi, 2010).
As an educator, it is my job to empower young people to take an effective leadership stake in their own activities. By providing training throughout every advocacy activity, students work to be actively engaged members of the global community. Students practice advocacy through three avenues of activism; educating others, fundraising, or protesting issues. Students must determine which channel they want to go down to improve the problems facing the world.
Resources:
Sethi, K. (2010, January). Kiran Sethi: Kids, take charge [Video file]. Retrieved from : http://www.ted.com/talks/kiran_bir_sethi_teaches_kids_to_take_ charge.html