Welcome to the Self-Advocacy Series where we will be taking a closer look at the concept and application of self-advocacy and ways to work on self-advocacy skills in the classroom. 

Teaching self-advocacy in the classroom plays an important dual role of emphasizing that every person should be able to advocate for themselves if they choose and teaching skills and knowledge that can help with practicing self-advocacy across a variety of settings. 

A great place to start in both areas is to talk about how we define self-advocacy and when we are practicing it.

If you seek out a definition of self-advocacy online you come across a variety of different descriptions that all vary a little bit. But they all share a common thread: self-advocacy is speaking up for yourself or your own interests. 

We believe that this is a helpful starting point for the role self-advocacy can play in a person’s life, but that we can also benefit from more closely examining what that might mean in practice.

So what are some ways in which we might be practicing self-advocacy day to day?

Self-awareness is a component of self-advocacy that is often overlooked but can be one of its most important components. 

While it may feel obvious to say we know what we need or want or believe, the truth is that we often face lots of external pressure to think or feel a certain way whether that’s what we truly want or not! 

The pressure can be such that even the term ‘self-awareness’ is often evoked as a way of asking someone to downplay or set aside their own needs. 

On top of all that external pressure, sometimes it’s just situationally difficult to decipher what we are feeling! In that sense, some of the most important self-advocacy skills you can develop are knowing what you are feeling, what you need, what you want, and what you believe.

These are the steps most closely associated with definitional self-advocacy and for good reason. When we are acting in our own interest that means either getting the thing we need/want or finding a way to request it from someone we think can help. 

In this space, one might learn the individual practical skills that help them meet specific needs, but we should also do our best to reinforce both that it is okay for us to pursue our own wants and needs, but also that it is OK to ask when we are not able to meet those needs on our own. 

You may be noticing a common theme here, and we should point out here that an important underlying skill across all forms of self-advocacy is self-worth, and cultivating the notion that the way we feel is more important than the way people tell us we are “supposed” to feel.

The importance of self-worth becomes even more apparent in our final section, which emphasizes the step of standing up for oneself when invalidated or denied by gatekeepers and also demonstrates two important facets of self-worth. 

The first is the ability to know when our needs are valid and to advocate for them even if we face institutional barriers or denial from gatekeepers. 

The second is knowing that even if people might disagree with our beliefs, our thoughts have enough worth that we can advocate for what we think. 

It’s not about always getting what we want or thinking we are always right about everything, it’s valuing ourselves enough to know we can continue to advocate for ourselves in certain situations where some people might try to make us feel bad for that self-advocacy.

We hope this brief dive into self-advocacy has opened up your thought process on all the forms it can take and all the ways it can be taught in the classroom. 

If there’s a particular self-advocacy related topic you’d like to hear more about then we’d love to hear from you! Just drop us a line at hello@autismgrownup.com and we will be back next week to dig into some specific examples of self-advocacy!