Introduction

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The city of Baltimore has an institutional legacy of youth organizing and student advocacy that stems from the early twentieth century's desegregation movement through today's systematic overfunding of youth jails and underfunding of youth jobs. For many young people, the classroom is a safe space to cultivate an opinion and construct a narrative in how they experience injustices in the world. These experiences, knowledge, and skills can be applied through the lens of their lived realities and students begin to shape their values through understanding what they care most about. While some students are driven to politics and policies, other students feel represented through subversive acts of advocacy. As the teacher, it is my goal and responsibility to provide opportunities in the classroom to explore a variety of tools, resources, and actions that reflect advocacy.

To engage in conversation and action advocacy, I expose my students to inequities relevant to their lived experiences on a local context. As a City Schools graduate, I am not merely a facilitator in conversation-based advocacy but I am able to draw connections for my students about experiences of local injustice across a historical time period. As a former youth organizer, I employ strategies and skills of action-based advocacy that expose my students to think critically about how they move from thinkers to agents of change. While my school does not denigrate student advocacy, there is also not a priority to cultivate student voice and action for the betterment of the school community. Therefore, for many of my seventh and eighth grade students, my classroom will be the first and only space in their middle school education where advocacy is prioritized as academic enrichment. Students come into the classroom already with experiences and knowledge; they leave with skill mastery to articulate their opinions and responses to inequality and formulate action-based interventions to impact change in their school and neighborhood community. 

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The current sociopolitical context of City Schools is centered on the injustices students have faced during this Winter season regarding the lack of maintenance infrastructure and heating conditions across elementary, middle, and high school students. As the district's decisions to open and close schools made news headlines and garnered social media attention, my students' lived realities began to be centerstage of national attention. As my students voiced their frustrations and perspective, my goal was to expose, education, and reinforce their interests and challenge them to move from talking about the issue to facing change directly. In my classroom, I utilized two main opportunities to cultivate conversation and action-based advocacy for my students, both centered on organic student reflections on local current events. 

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The main evidence and reflections of conversation and action-based advocacy were cultivated with my eighth grade students. The first advocacy opportunity stemmed from a local City Council meeting that was held at my school in the weeks following the heating and building infrastructure crisis in City Schools. The second advocacy opportunity began simply as a warm-up prompt to students on a day when there should have been at least a delay due to inclement weather, but we were responsible for getting to school on time in these dangerous weather conditions. By the end of the warm-up discussion, my students were already voicing their concerns and interventions on the weather policy change. These two advocacy experiences are directly related, as I believe students utilize the experience, skill, and mindset gained through the first project and apply it across experiences of injustice for themselves and other students. 

Below, you can click each image to explore how I support students' learning experience and enrichment through conversation and action-based advocacy projects: