In the most recent news out of Washington, a Dear Colleague letter was circulating thanks to Senator Mikulski. A special site bulletin was sent out as another call to action to encourage folks to contact their representatives again to obtain support for NWP. For myself, I have my National and State Reps contact information saved in my cell phone so I can call whenever I get the mind to (I save their emails and mailing addresses, too. You never know). But here in Michigan, our unions are under assault, we have budget issues that have decimated school funding, and people are being called upon weekly and sometimes daily to get out the word to this or that elected official. How do we overcome "advocacy fatigue?" I know we have a dedicated group of WP teachers who will always pick up the phone, but the majority will do it rarely, if at all. What strategies have worked for other sites in this time of deep cuts and seemingly constant advocacy for what we know helps kids and teachers?
Responses
This is a good question, Andrea, and one that folks took up a little in this NWP Radio program: Sharing Our Knowledge. Folks shared tips from their sites about exactly this issue and like your post, their comments should be tagged 'inspiration'.
I see you raising another issue in your response, which is about the multiple attacks on what we as educators believe coming in from so many different directions in education today. How do we keep up energy if we begin to doubt the possibility of success? This assault on our collective professional confidence, if it happens, will be the biggest blow from our loss of federal funding. If you think back over the 20 years of steadily growing federal funding, this is the first time we've had a serious reversal. So this is the chance for us to learn those "bounceback" techniques that we haven't had to use before, and I think we can do it.