History of Global Advocacy at ACS

A brief history

Our journey began all the way back in school year 2011-12 with a Middle States Association re-accreditation process. Through the facilitation of John Littleford and the commitment of the ACS community, we renewed the ACS mission and creat our Student Profile and developed our Strategic Plan. 

In school year 2016-17, it was determined that we needed to update the Strategic Plan as most elements had been accomplished. As a result the work "compassionate" was added to the Mission to read "compassionate citizens." 

In the 2018-19 school year, a group of passionate educators at ACS looked at our student profile. One of our 3 personal traits at the time was "global awareness." That team felt that awareness was much too passive and changed the language to "global advocacy." We also began the work of self-examination for re-accreditation process. 

In the 2019-20 school year, ACS worked with the Middle States Association to take on an innovative new accreditation protocol. This involved committing to a 7 year action research cycle. What did we choose as the subject of the action research? Global Advocacy. 

In the 2020-21 school year, we began collecting data and thinking about the kind of world that we wanted our students to have an impact on. We created some foundational statements and shared our global advocacy vision with the community. 

In the 2021-22 school year, we continued data collection and used the Design Thinking Cycle to begin to design and test out innovation solutions for our action research.

In the 2022-23 school year, we focused on the global skill of recognizing perspectives on the basis of the data we collected. We also began to integrate our Global Advocacy Learning Outcomes into curriculum and instruction.

In the 2023-24 school year, we will re-assess our progress with global advocacy through re-administering the Global Advocacy Survey. We will also continue our work with the GALOs and finalize our Intercultural Competence Framework.