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| Child Advocacy: a. The practice of giving priority in decisions to advancing the personal benefits of learners in and out of schools. b. The term Bonnie Cook coined in 1967 to represent the behavior patterns she and other field teachers used. c. The term adapted with permission from the Field Teaching project in North Carolina for inclusion in the 1968 White House Conference on Children.
EduClassics.com of Classic Education describes how learners adopt, adapt, and manage behavior patterns they use to learn, including a classic education in the 21st century. This page defines Child Advocacy as the term that emerged from Field Teaching to represent how field teachers addressed the latent, but still unnamed learners’ view of learning. This page also describes a sample of behavior patterns advocates used to increase personal benefits obtained by learners.
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The practice of child advocacy emerged into identifiable behavior patterns through the efforts of 35 undergraduate and graduate students attending the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the late 1960s. This was a time of civil unrest and street riots in the United States.
The Setting
In 1967, desegregation events of historic proportions were reported daily in news accounts and in networks of community rumors. Some UNC students and faculty were monitoring these events. A few identified themselves as having taken part in the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington and heard Martin Luther King, Jr. give his famous speech, I Have A Dream.
1967 was also the start of desegration of Chapel Hill and surrounding community public schools. In September prior to the beginning of school, the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in a field South of town. The White Citizens’ Council was meeting to schedule armed school bus escorts to protect their daughters. The council included prominent community leaders in business and in the justice system.
Child Advocacy Emerged
Into this environment, Bonnie Cook coined the term to represent how she and other field teachers tried to increase advantages, advancement, and other social gains (profits) of children attending public schools. She was a masters’ student in special education and an experienced speech therapist. She knew university and community leaders in part because she was the wife of the past commander of the university’s Reserve Officers Training Corp (ROTC). He was deployed to Vietnam with four of his former students.
Ms. Cook was the second field teacher and was a major recruiter of field teachers as well as of problems for them to address.
Child advocates tutored learners, conducted mini-schools, took paperwork through bureaucratic mazes to obtain public services promptly for learners and their family members, met with school and public officials on behalf of specific learners or their family members, …
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Related Resources
Related Reading
Perspectives on (Chapel Hill) school desegregation: Fran Jackson