My colleague Ollie Dreon and I have been busy reading, researching, and presenting our work about preparing teachers to be advocates. We have been thinking about how to prepare teachers to advocate (as mandated by and within the teacher preparation standards to which we are accountable), especially within the polarized socio-political contexts in which educators find themselves working. My brain is soaking in advocacy-related ideas right now, and I’m seeing the situations I encounter differently as a result.
A situation that popped up this morning has me asking a new question: What if the care educators have for their students is both a prerequisite for advocacy and the thing that sometimes thwarts those advocacy efforts?
For instance, an educator who spends their time, energy, and resources to purchase a coat or a textbook for an under-resourced student meets a students’ tangible need. Similarly, a faculty member might stay late to meet with a student in crisis. Most would agree these acts are (at least intended as) an act of care. Yet, administrators and institutions may never see or feel responsible to meet such needs if educators continually meet those needs.
Educators who solve issues in the short term may be unintentionally perpetuating long-term, systemic issues that actually merit their advocacy. In some situations, educators may need to stop solving short-term problems in order to increase the pressure the system to change. What if caring through advocacy would be more effective (in the long term) than the problem-solving care teachers are so used to doing in the short term?
The definition of advocacy that Ollie and I have been using in our work is:
an attempt, having a greater than zero probability of success, by an individual or group to influence another individual or group to make a decision that would not have been made otherwise and that concerns the welfare or interests of a third party who is in a less powerful status than the decision maker.
(Sosin & Caulum, 1983, p. 13)
I suppose what I am arguing here is that educators could increase the probability of success in influencing others if they stopped meeting all the needs created by a broken, failing system.
I recognize that this might seem inhumane. No one wants students to suffer. I don’t want students to go coat-less, textbook-less, field placement-less, or without classes on their schedule. I do not want a single student to remain in crisis.
Paul Gorsky,* who spoke at the university where I work in the fall of 2017, used the examples of coat drives and homelessness to challenge the audience’s desire to do good. He called for work that dismantles oppressive structures (by challenging the conditions that create homelessness) which we often forsake in service of treating the symptoms of homelessness (e.g., having coat drives or serving in soup kitchens). Gorsky acknowledged that treating the symptoms often make us feel like we are doing something helpful but the impact of such actions is often short-lived and allows the oppression to continue. In the talk, Gorsky acknowledged our human desire to meet the needs right in front of us when he said, “However, I don’t want the homeless to freeze to death while I work on structural issues.”
The advocacy work of educators will need to include mitigating the needs of the students right in front of us while engaging in advocacy that challenges the structures and policies that create those needs in the first place. Today I’m wondering if a short break on meeting student needs might actually increase the success of our advocacy.
*I wrote about Paul Gorsky’s effect on my work previously here:
Gates, L. (2019). The abundance of knowledge and the shortage of activism: Taking action to confront teacher certification exams. Journal of Art for Life, 1-10.
References
Sosin, M., & Caulum, S. (1983). Advocacy: A conceptualization for social work practice. Social Work, 28(1),12–17.
Leslie Gates 