FEATURE

Self Advocacy =

Self Esteem

By John Anderson, VOICE Conference 2008 keynote speaker

Through his more than 10 years of working with parents and children as the mainstream adjustment counsellor at the
Mainstream Center at CLARKE School Center for Oral Education in the United States, he has built on his own personal
lifetime experiences as a person with hearing loss.

In John’s words …
I have read the literature, I have had conversations with my colleagues, I have talked with parents, and I have had conversations
with students of all ages. I am convinced that acquiring many of the skills that are needed to advocate for yourself with
a hearing loss begin with helping parents learn many of the skills that their children will need as they grow up. Yet frequently,
I come across statements from parents and professionals that students with hearing loss are expected to automatically
learn these skills on their own in a timely manner.

And what are these skills? In my mind, they are a cluster of skills that interact with each other:
1. Problem solving skills
2. Communication skills
3. Social skills
4. Stress management skills

For this article, I don’t want to review how each of these skills help a student advocate. Instead I want to focus on the process,
because it is a lifelong process that involves finding out who you are with a hearing loss and who you hope to be. This is lifelong
self-advocacy for two reasons: Firstly, hearing loss most likely will not be cured during their lifetime, so they will need
to learn some skills to help them in a wide variety of situations involving communication. Secondly, these students will probably
be mainstreamed with students who have normal or typical hearing, and these students will know little about the challenges
of communicating through a hearing loss. So, over time, a student with hearing loss will need to learn a variety of skills
to help make their relationships with people with typical hearing work more smoothly despite the presence of hearing loss.

My own view of self-advocacy is that the skills that a student needs cannot be learned and developed unless the student
already feels good about who he is as a person. In short, the work of self-advocacy requires a growing sense of self-esteem.
I need to get to know myself and learn to like who I am.

It is important to start early with self-advocacy. This means we need to start as early as kindergarten in teaching kids the
skills to help make communication work for everyone. This will be difficult to achieve, however, if we do not help the parents
to teach the same skills at home. School and home share the opportunity for communication in groups. In these settings,
there are many opportunities to teach skills such as: turn taking, raising your hand when you want to speak, allowing for
communication repair, and announcing new topics.

As the child grows into middleschool years, the parent’s role of advocate needs to begin shifting to allow for the student to

become an active participant in choosing the services and technology that will allow him to advocate for communication
access in a variety of situations. These typically are the hardest years to self-advocate, since adolescence is challenging enough.

But, through self-advocacy exposure experiences, problem solving and negotiating skills will be honed.

By the time a student reaches high school, we should see more evidence of independence, understanding, and responsibility.
Personal growth as an individual with hearing loss to date has been about learning to take care of yourself with your
hearing loss. Our goal in teaching self-advocacy skills is to encourage the student to think of him or herself as a whole person
first; as an individual who also happens to have a hearing loss.

Learning the skills of self-advocacy are the tools that can help a person with hearing loss pursue his or her dreams. In
essence, developing the self-confidence needed to self-advocate are the stepping stones to a healthy self-esteem.