Tag: strategies

This is archive page

Advancing Advocacy: Lessons Learned From Advocates in School Psychology

Although school psychologists are called on a daily basis to advocate for the needs of our nations’ schoolchildren, little is known about the factors that contribute to effective school-based advocacy. This study involved face-to-face interviews with 21 award-winning school psychology advocates. They described what led them into advocacy, obstacles faced, successes experienced, mistakes made, strategies used, resources employed, skills needed, and changes observed. The advocates discussed their definitions of advocacy, how they find balance, their advice for newcomers, and how they empower others. Following a qualitative content analysis, their collective input yielded important findings, including indispensable advice for future advocates. Most suggested that beginners’ build relationships with like-minded collaborators and the targets of their advocacy, devote time to building expertise, and be patient and persistent. Common obstacles included intransigence among school psychology colleagues who were reluctant to change their roles to reflect new developments in the field or who feared participating in advocacy would destabilize their positions. To fully embrace an advocacy role, most advised advocacy education and training for both existing school psychologists and newcomers to the field. Limitations and implications that inform a foundation for advancing advocacy within school psychology are discussed.

As a profession, school psychology has long promoted itself as advocating for the needs, rights, and welfare of children and their families, as well as for high-quality educational services designed to maximize children’s potential. Historically, advocacy has been a central and defining feature of the services delivered by school psychologists (Merrell, Ervin, & Gimpel, 2006). In the 2000 iteration of the National Association of School Psychologists’

This article was published Online First March 7, 2019. Margaret R. Rogers, Department of Psychology, University of Rhode Island; Marisa E. Marraccini, School of Education, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Anna G. Lubiner, Department of Psychology, University of Rhode Island; Jennifer A. Dupont-Frechette, Delta Consultants, Providence, Rhode Island; Elisabeth C. O’Bryon, Family Engagement Lab, Oakland, California. A special thank you to the group of esteemed advocates who shared their stories, insights, and personal experiences to help us all learn to become better advocates. The study was funded by a Career Enhancement Grant to the first author from the University of Rhode Island. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Margaret R. Rogers, Department of Psychology, University of Rhode Island, Chafee Hall, 142 Flagg Road, Kingston, Rhode Island 02881. E-mail: mrogers@ uri.edu

NASP) Principles for Professional Ethics (NASP, 2000), the school psychologist’s role as an advocate was identified as one of two considered foundational to the profession (the second being to “do no harm”). Since then, school psychology’s engagement in advocacy has become visible in several ways. For example, the current NASP Principles for Professional Ethics defines advocacy as a voice guided by expertise “for the rights and welfare of students and families” and promoting “changes in schools, systems, and laws that benefit schoolchildren, other students, and families” (NASP, 2010a, p. 3). Advocacy was also one of the three main themes addressed in the most recent School Psychology Futures Conference (in 2012) and is highlighted in a number of ways in the 2010 NASP Model for Comprehensive and Integrated School Psychological Services (NASP, 2010b), which is used by over 200 school psychology programs in the United States as the framework for the education and training of future school psychologists. Yet despite the resurgence of interest in advocacy, when we reflect on what we really know about the science of advocacy, we find the evidence base in school psychology limited. Understanding the science behind advocacy, including what it takes to be an effective advocate, the strategies used to advocate successfully, and the resources advocates need, is especially important at the present time. School psychologists and other mental health professionals are expected to advocate about many different issues, needs, and concerns for a variety of populations and across multiple settings and ecological levels. However, we know little about what successful advocates do when they engage in advocacy work, the best way to start advocating, and the skills found to be particularly useful. We also know little about the obstacles advocates face as well as the kinds of mistakes that seasoned advocates have made that we can all learn from. In addition, given the demanding nature of advocacy work, an important question to ask is, what do advocates do to find and maintain balance in their lives? This information is important for the field as well as for individual school psychologists to achieve and maintain optimal levels of effectiveness. Graduate students, early career, and established practicing school psychologists who do not receive formal training or who are not explicitly taught how to advocate may be overwhelmed when deciding where and how to begin their advocacy work. Lating, Barnett, and Horowitz (2009) found that although the majority of faculty representing psychology doctoral programs agree that advocacy awareness and training is important to students’ development, 60% of the programs that took part in a National Council of Schools and Programs of Professional Psychology’s Self-Study acknowledged not providing advocacy training and activities for students. Graduate preparation programs may not prioritize preparation explicitly about advocacy because they assume that students will acquire advocacy skills informally through their applied training or through incidental observations. Given the central place of advocacy in school psychologists’ professional roles, such a casual approach seems inadequate. Without education and training in how to be the best possible advocate, the wisdom and expertise school psychologists have may not get well represented when important decisions are made about children’s academic and mental well-being. Perhaps part of the reason for the lack of widespread integration of advocacy education within graduate programs may be linked to the importance that faculty members place on preparing their students to be advocates. In a recent survey of school psychologists about their perceptions of the most important competencies for practice, Fenning et al. (2015) found that the largely faculty- and school-based practitioner sample (making up 79% and 11% of participants, respectively) considered advocacy, although still important, among the least highly rated activities. Their sample considered the activities associated with traditional school psychology practice (e.g., assessment, intervention) relatively more important than advocacy. For faculty members who placed less importance on advocacy, the challenge may be in finding space for such coverage within an already crowded curriculum. For practitioners who rated advocacy as less important, advocacy work may seem more ill-defined than other role expectations and service delivery demands. Still, the press to prepare school psychologists as effective advocates has been a long standing one, and one that may be argued is now long overdue.

A review of the literature in school psychology suggests a paucity of data-based scholarship examining advocacy. In a departure from the norm, using grounded theory, Graybill, Varjas, Meyers, and Watson (2009) sought to identify the advocacy strategies that 22 advisors to Gay–Straight Alliances used in the schools on behalf of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender (GLBT) youth. They found that the advisors advocated in varied ways depending on the context, with most approaches involving a verbal in-the-moment response directed at an individual student or school staff member. Other strategies involved attempts to raise awareness by displaying GLBT-friendly signs and by gathering information to share with the school community through outreach to national organizations. At present, no other investigation in school psychology has gone beyond the findings of Graybill et al. to identify additional advocacy strategies that may be used to promote the emotional, social, and academic well-being of youth and their families.

To provide a full array of psychological services, school psychologists need to be equipped to work at multiple levels within their work settings. Implementing developmentally appropriate, culturally informed, empirically based mental health services, whether one-to-one, in groups, or systemically, involves working to change ecosystems within schools. In their study of facilitative factors and barriers to providing integrated and comprehensive school psychological services, Castillo, Arroyo-Plaza, Tan, Sabnis, and Mattison (2017) called for graduate program faculty to devote time in the curriculum to help students learn about systems change. This call is not new within professional circles, having been repeatedly voiced by those who wish to expand the roles of school psychologists as the way to provide comprehensive mental health services in the schools (Meyers, Meyers, Graybill, Proctor, & Huddleston, 2012; Ringeisen, Henderson, & Hoagwood, 2003; Schaughency & Ervin, 2006). Castillo et al. (2017) and others have stressed the importance of school psychologists knowing not only how to engage in systems change but also how to advocate for such changes within their professional work settings. For those who have advocated for such changes but not achieved the desired effects, it would be helpful to know how successful advocates have gone about their advocacy activities to realize change. Tips, insights, and advice from seasoned advocates may help to expand school psychologists’ advocacy activities, erase uncertainties, and provide the knowledge needed to gain a foothold as a successful advocate.

The present study was designed to explore the experiences and tools of award-winning school psychology advocates. The awards, described more fully in the Procedures subsection, recognized each participant’s achievements in advocacy. The study aimed to create a detailed understanding of their work as advocates, including what led them into advocacy, the resources they employed, the strategies used, the obstacles faced, the successes experienced, the mistakes made, the skills most important, and the advances witnessed in issues they have advocated about. Also, we sought to learn how they define advocacy, find balance in their lives, and empower others through their work, as well as to identify what advice they have for newcomers to advocacy. Implicitly, we hoped to demystify the work of advocates in school psychology and begin to build a scientific base about best practices in school psychology advocacy.

  • Margaret R. Rogers, University of Rhode Island
  • Marisa E. Marraccini, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  • Anna G. Lubiner, University of Rhode Island
  • Jennifer A. Dupont-Frechette Delta Consultants, Providence, Rhode Island
  • Elisabeth C. O’Bryon, Family Engagement Lab, Oakland, California

 

Download Full Article

This is archive page

Advocates in Public Service Settings: Voices From the Field

Numerous conceptual pieces addressing the importance of advocacy within psychology have been published over the last 20 years. Most recently, that chorus of voices has increasingly focused on the needs of historically marginalized populations (Burney et al., 2009; Garrison, DeLeon, & Smedley, 2017; Nadal, 2017). Despite this attention, a dearth of research has explored the experiences of seasoned advocates who work with such populations. The present investigation drew from an interdisciplinary group of award-winning advocates to reveal how they define and conceptualize advocacy; the motivators and barriers they’ve experienced; and their recommendations about how to support newcomers to advocacy. Through semistructured face-to-face interviews that were content analyzed qualitatively, the 14 advocates describe important lessons about advocacy work. Participants’ desires to become an advocate were fueled mostly by personal interests and early formative experiences. They found collaborations and building networks (i.e., building relationships with people on all sides of an issue) to be their chief advocacy strategies, and stressed the importance of interpersonal and communication skills (e.g., taking initiative, making connections with those in power) in their skill repertoire. The main barriers encountered included psychological resistance (i.e., intentional blindness toward hidden populations), funding constraints, and various other negative obstacles. Although most found creating a work-life balance elusive, they were energized by mentoring advocacy newcomers, by successes achieved in legislative/policy/program advances, and by creating systems that provide needed services. They shared wisdom about a host of issues for a new generation of advocates.

As individual and community needs become more diverse, psychologists are faced with the increasingly complex task of advocating effectively for improved conditions for individuals, organizations, and society (Melton, 2018). Given the range of settings in which psychologists are employed and their varied roles within those settings, advocacy takes many forms, and is delivered in different dosages and contexts, using a variety of methods

This article was published Online First May 23, 2019. Margaret R. Rogers, Department of Psychology, University of Rhode Island; Marisa E. Marraccini, School of Education, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Elisabeth C. O’Bryon, Family Engagement Lab, Oakland, California; Jennifer A. Dupont-Frechette, Delta Consultants, Providence, Rhode Island; Anna G. Lubiner, Department of Psychology, University of Rhode Island. We would like to extend a warm thank-you to our participating advocates for their time, enthusiasm, and openness in sharing of themselves and their stories so that we can all learn from their experiences as advocates. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Margaret R. Rogers, Department of Psychology, University of Rhode Island, Chafee Hall, 142 Flagg Road, Kingston, RI 02881. E-mail: mrogers@uri.edu

(DeLeon, Loftis, Ball, & Sullivan, 2006). The breadth of advocacy efforts is wide, focusing on direct and individual support, public policy decisions, advances in human welfare services, public health, systems of care, training and education, consultation, research, and funding (American Psychological Association, 2017). Despite the growing and critical need for wide-ranging advocacy within the psychological community (Fox, 2008; Heinowitz et al., 2012; Lating, Barnett, & Horowitz, 2009), the extant literature available to guide psychologists to serve as effective advocates is limited. Even less is known about the knowledge and skills needed to advocate effectively on behalf of marginalized and underserved populations, despite this being one of psychologists’ key professional responsibilities (Nadal, 2017). The focus on advocacy aimed at marginalized and underserved populations is especially important in addressing systemic factors and societal inequities that limit people’s voices, opportunities, and impact. Advocacy that has a social justice mission has added layers of complexity because it combines individual and systemic advocacy and often requires that the psychologist be skilled in both. Indeed, the American Psychological Association clearly articulates this professional responsibility in its 2017 Multicultural Guidelines:

An Ecological Approach to Context, Identity, and Intersectionality, as it provides parameters for multiculturally competent services and highlights the importance of advocacy on behalf of persons from disadvantaged and discriminated populations. To improve psychologists’ ability to advocate effectively on behalf of underserved populations, it is critical to know and understand how effective advocacy in this area is defined and conceptualized; the motivators and barriers experienced by effective advocates; and key insights from successful advocates on how to support future advocates committed to promoting positive outcomes for marginalized populations. An examination of the existing research in these areas yields gaps in our knowledge base. Defining and Conceptualizing Effective Advocacy Although historically advocacy has been a ubiquitous feature within the field of psychology (Nadal, 2017), it is conceived of and applied in many different ways (Lating et al., 2009). To ground ourselves in a common definition that facilitates an understanding of advocacy on behalf of marginalized groups, we share Trusty and Brown’s (2005) summary of multiple descriptions of advocacy as “identifying unmet needs and taking actions to change the circumstances that contribute to the problem or inequity” (p. 259). While this definition sheds light on the process and goal, additional research is needed to understand how and under what circumstances psychologists can advocate effectively on behalf of underserved populations. An understanding of the specific definitions, skills, resources, and strategies used by effective, experienced advocates in different settings can provide an invaluable guide for psychologists who seek to be successful advocates. As aptly noted by Cohen, Lee, and McIlwraith (2012), the knowledge and skills needed to advocate effectively can be taught and it is a critical responsibility that psychologists learn them.

Key Motivators and Barriers While essential for a comprehensive understanding of effective advocacy, the research literature provides limited insight regarding the factors that serve to activate and obstruct those who advocate on behalf of the underserved. Instead, research has examined advocacy-related motivators and barriers more broadly and, in some cases, examined advocacy aimed at advancing a professional group rather than advocacy to address clients’ needs (e.g., Myers & Sweeney, 2004). In other cases, research has looked at barriers to advocacy encountered by a largely preservice sample rather than by experienced advocates (e.g., Heinowitz et al., 2012). Most recently Kozan and Blustein (2018) provided key insights into 11 licensed counseling psychologists’ attempts to engage in social justice-focused advocacy following their graduation from programs that specifically prepared them to engage in such advocacy. Social justice advocacy training supports psychologists’ ability to effectively address the social contexts that contribute to an individual’s marginalization (Mallinckrodt, Miles, & Levy, 2014). Kozan and Blustein (2018) found that the psychologists’ efforts at advocacy on behalf of clients were often stymied by systemic barriers, including working in settings that do not espouse and share justice-oriented values and priorities. The psychologists also found themselves hampered by a larger structural problem—that of working within a field that focuses almost exclusively on helping individuals to improve intrapsychically without regard for the very real systemic contributions to people’s problems. Kozan and Blustein (2018) argue that this later issue is a problem endemic to the structure of our nation’s mental health care system. These findings are important because they begin to explore the barriers psychologists face when advocating for underserved clients. However, what is still needed is a more complete picture of the full range of barriers and obstacles encountered by advocates for the underserved to fully understand the challenges they confront and grapple with.

Other research has focused on strategies advocates and the organizations that they work for have used when advocating. Mason (2015) surveyed 259 leaders of nonprofit organizations in California to study the relationship between the leaders’ political ideologies and the advocacy tactics used by their organizations to influence legislation. The leaders averaged about six years as advocates. The findings suggested that the more conservative the leaders, the more likely their organizations were to use a wide array of strategies including face-to-face lobbying, petition drives, boycotts, sit-ins, and media campaigns. In another study exploring advocacy strategies, Gee, McGarty, and Banfield (2015) interviewed nine advocates from two organizations representing the mentally ill in Australia. The advocates – relatively new to advocacy with an average of about four years’ experience—described the importance of building partnerships, establishing strong relationships between their constituents and themselves, and finding ways to influence the mental health system (e.g., lobbying) (Gee et al., 2015). These findings help us to understand the types of strategies that early career advocates employ. What we do not yet know are the motivators, strategies, and barriers experienced by seasoned experts – that is, those with extensive and wellestablished careers – whose work focuses on a diverse array of marginalized populations, and how their experiences can inform and guide psychologists who advocate.

A study by Goodman, Wilson, Helms, Greenstein, and Medzhitova (2018) of recent graduates of a masters-level mental health counseling program provides unique insights specifically related to working with and advocating on behalf of underserved groups. Each of the advocates were within two and a half years of completing their advocacy practicum. Interviews revealed that as advocates’ relationships with individuals from marginalized communities deepened, so did their experience of strong emotions—both pleasant and unpleasant (i.e., feeling frustrated, overwhelmed, angry, moved, and inspired). The positive feelings often countered the more disheartening ones, by highlighting the value of the work, deepening advocates’ commitment, and increasing their confidence as advocates (Goodman et al., 2018). The opportunity to learn about the experiences of leading advocates working on behalf of marginalized and underserved populations can shed additional, necessary light on the important skills, strategies and resources employed, and the barriers psychologists may face when advocating in this space

  • Margaret R. Rogers, University of Rhode Island
  • Marisa E. Marraccini, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  • Elisabeth C. O’Bryon, Family Engagement Lab, Oakland, California
  • Jennifer A. Dupont-Frechette, Delta Consultants, Providence, Rhode Island
  • Anna G. Lubiner, University of Rhode Island

Download Full Article