What is Advocacy?
Advocacy is any action that argues for, supports, defends, or advances the rights and interests of one’s self or others. Advocacy can take many forms. It can be used on a large scale to influence public policy, on a personal level to ask for the needs of an individual to be met, and at many levels in between. In the context of special education, advocacy largely means asking for individualization of instruction and assessments through the use of accommodations or curriculum modifications, if appropriate.
In your role as an educator you will most commonly encounter two types of advocacy: parental advocacy and self-advocacy on the part of your students.