Your teacher finally returns your math test, but your grade is much lower than you expected it to be. It turns out that for all of the problems, you did 90% of them correctly but made a simple mathematical mistake somewhere that threw off the final answer. You understood the concept being taught, but these simple errors plummeted your grade. To make things worse, your teacher has said that she doesn’t give partial credit.
What would you do in this scenario? Do you resign yourself to that unfair grade, or do you advocate for yourself, attempting to reason with your teacher and earn back some points?
We often think of advocacy as something done with a group of people or for a specific cause, but what we often don’t realize is that advocacy is something we also must do for ourselves. In order to speak up for those around us, we must be able to speak for ourselves. Self-advocacy is a crucial skill that we need to actively practice because we have to learn to how to respectfully push back against events in life that set us back.
As students, we have the opportunity to practice advocacy everyday. If you ask your teacher to clarify an assignment or re-explain how to work a problem, you are practicing self-advocacy.
“When we’re faced with unfavorable situations, we generally have two options: we can reluctantly accept an unfavorable thing, or we can advocate for ourselves, attempting to change it into something more favorable.”
Here’s a real-life example of a friend of mine who advocated for herself while she and I were at Penn State University:
My friend wanted to learn more about starting her own business. Being a film student, she wasn’t allowed to take the business courses she was interested in because they’re reserved for business majors. She could have given up right there and resigned herself to the fact that she can’t enroll in business courses. But instead, she emailed the professors asking if she could sit in on the courses. She wouldn’t receive a grade, wouldn’t officially be listed on the course registrar, and wouldn’t be taking any of the tests or papers, but she would still gain access to the knowledge and lectures the professors are distributing. And if any professors said it couldn’t be done, she’d ask if they could instead simply share their course syllabus. With the syllabus, my friend could read from the same texts the professor is using and still learn a lot of the same information as the business students.
Instead of trying to persuade the business school to let her officially enroll in business courses, my friend persevered and figured out other ways she could obtain the knowledge she sought. She advocated for herself, and as a result she was able to access information that few others outside of the business school ever would.
When we’re faced with unfavorable situations, we generally have two options: we can reluctantly accept an unfavorable thing, or we can advocate for ourselves, attempting to change it into something more favorable. Of course there’s no guarantee that advocacy will always change the outcome — sometimes we just have to accept our circumstances and move on. But the worst that could happen (assuming you’re advocating politely and not burning bridges) is that the situation remains unchanged, which is exactly what would occur anyway if you chose to do nothing! Yes, advocating for yourself won’t change everything in your favor. But if you don’t try it, nothing will change at all.
The ability to advocate for yourself is clearly a crucial skill to possess, so at this point there should only be one question on your mind: how can I practice and develop the skill? At the risk of sounding like a Nike ad campaign…Just do it.
Self-advocacy isn’t accepting your situation as-is, self-advocacy is actively attempting to change it. If there’s something you want (or something you want changed), talk to the people who are in a position to change it for you. Remember to be polite—because few people respond well to bullying or attitude—and be prepared to explain why you believe the situation should change.
If you felt your teacher was especially harsh grading a particular assignment, schedule a time to speak to them and ask about it; if you’re asking for a grade change, then be prepared to give your professor reasons why you deserve that change; if you are taking a test and can’t make sense of the problem, ask the instructor to clarify. And if it seems like really you won’t be able to get what you wanted, offer compromises or think about other avenues through which you could achieve your goal.
Let me end this piece with a story from my own personal experience at Penn State:
As an undergraduate psychology student, I had to complete a specific English course in order to graduate. I hadn’t taken this course, but I had taken another potentially similar course that I hoped I could substitute for the required course. My adviser told me that (1) the Psychology department program rarely makes substitutions for the required class, and (2) that the course I had taken was in an entirely different format than the class I was trying to substitute it for. On top of that, the three writing samples I had included to try and strengthen my argument were all deemed insufficient.
It felt like I was fighting insurmountable odds, and it would have been very easy to give up on this cause and resign myself to taking the required course. But I didn’t give up so easily — I persisted. I continued speaking with my adviser, inquiring about all the rules or processes that could aid my argument and submitted additional writing samples for review.
The next email I got from my adviser was that my substitution had been approved.