The state of student advocacy in the United States is constantly evolving, with a rising generation of Gen Z leaders using contemporary technologies, emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, and in a divided political climate. This study examined the current challenges and strategies of student advocacy in K-12 and higher education, with a focus on how student advocacy can support the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement. This study summarizes learnings from 30 in-depth interviews from participants from a wide variety of community-based to national nonprofit organizations, informing how student advocacy could best be leveraged to promote and accelerate strategies around OER implementation, and vice versa - how OER could be incorporated into new workflows of student advocacy.
Attendees of this session will be able to:- Delineate student advocacy workflows in youth-led and intergenerational-led nonprofit organizations
- Apply OER best practices to incorporate into student advocacy for different types of causes
- Leverage student advocacy for various facets of the OER movement, whether in schools, university campuses, community spaces etc.
