Building Independence Through Advocacy
This activity aims to build independence and advocacy skills.
Watch
Self-Advocacy - A State of Mind (5:31) – Student, Abby Edwards, shares her personal experience with advocacy and how to challenge you.
Discuss
You may currently be your own self-advocate, but you may also have others like guardian(s), teachers, counselors, or others who help you make decisions. To make sure decisions are made WITH you, not FOR you, you have to communicate what you want for yourself. In the lesson you will learn ways to help you advocate for yourself. It is important to build these skills since you will need and use them the rest of your life! By learning to advocate for yourself, you’ll gain the confidence to handle problems and decide on your goals.
Review
One way to develop these skills is by practicing how you would handle a situation. In this activity, you will review different problems and ways to find solutions to those problems.
Option 1: Use the Advocacy and Decision Making Scenarios to identify a few different scenarios for the students to practice together as a group.
Option 2: Assign the same scenarios to pairs of students. Ask them to work together to find solutions. Once everyone is finished, ask the pairs to share their solutions and see if anyone find different solutions to the same scenario.
Option 3: Ask students to review several scenarios of their choice. They can write down their solutions on the Advocacy and Decision Making Scenarios Worksheet and then share with the group or instructor for feedback.
Option 4: Have students role-play their solutions to each scenario, practicing how they would handle challenges and communicate their needs. Encourage them to use clear and respectful language when speaking up or asking for help. Through role-playing, students build confidence in self-advocacy and problem-solving skills.
Reflect
Now that you have thought through some scenarios of how you would handle situations, let’s review ways to advocate by doing the Self-Evaluation Tool’s Speak Up! Section together.