HOW TO GET STARTED
The work of being an Everyday Advocate is situational: each of us enters into advocacy in different ways depending on our context and our experiences with speaking up and out.
Whatever your experience, this site can help. We suggest you start with a dive into our Guiding Principles for advocacy. Then Learn how to build a foundation for doing this work by identifying the burning issue that keeps you up at night. Next, Prepare to change what others think about that issue, culminating in an action plan. Finally, Act by mapping a specific path toward long-lasting change.
Regardless of the situation, storytelling is central to how we learn, prepare, and act as Everyday Advocates. Take some time now for a quick immersion into the connection between storytelling and advocacy.
STORYTELLING
Storytelling is how we interact with each other about values; how we share experiences with each other, counsel each other, comfort each other, and inspire each other to action. — Marshall Ganz
The work of Marshall Ganz is particularly appealing to those of us who teach English / Language Arts. Here’s why: Ganz focuses on the idea of a public narrative as the means by which an issue comes to be understood in a community, a narrative that draws upon the story elements we know so well: plot, characters, setting, and morals.
For Ganz, this public narrative is complex, though. It is much more than the telling of an individual story, a trope teachers (and others) too often rely on to help the public understand the story of education (i.e., the story of Teacher X who overcame great obstacles to reach these difficult children or the story of Teacher Y whose classroom practices shows us the “true” story of urban education). Ganz’s public narrative has three parts: the story of self, the story of us, and the story of now.
This transition from individual story to public narratives gives us a way to see that individual anecdotes—while necessary to us as teachers—are not enough. The power of story is that it helps us recognize and articulate the values we share as a community of teachers. That identification is the first step in making change.