Data advocacy is a deeply ethical and rhetorical practice of integrated analysis, design, and communication in which insights from a dataset are effectively gleaned and conveyed to raise public awareness and drive social change.

Guiding Purpose

Whether used by nonprofits to catalyze social action, think tanks to argue for policy change, or organizations to promote legislative equity, data advocacy is an increasingly important means of communication in the era of ubiquitous data. Yet while more and more undergraduate students are being exposed to the technical aspects of data science, too few students are being taught the complex array of data skills, ethical mindsets, and communication practices needed to use data responsibly and effectively to advocate for social change. Data Advocacy for All addresses this curricular gap by offering a toolkit of educational resources to help students think critically and ethically about data; learn minimal computing and data processing skills; and practice generating data-driven stories and arguments in order to ethically translate data into effective real-world action.

Guiding Frameworks

The design and creation of the Data Advocacy for All project has been heavily inspired by the frameworks of critical data studies, data science, and rhetorical data studies:

Guiding Perspectives

In thinking about data advocacy through the frameworks of critical data studies, data science, and rhetorical data studies, the Data Advocacy for All team gleaned four key perspectives about effective data advocacy that led to the development of our toolkit and its organizational schema of literacy domains:

1. Effective data advocacy demands a critical mindset. It entails understanding what data is from multiple perspectives; being conscientious about how data can do both harm and good; and consistently questioning, analyzing, and evaluating how data is used by various constituents to advocate for change.
2. Effective data advocacy demands a strong ethical approach. It involves taking proactive actions to process and present data in ways that respect individuals and communities by prioritizing inclusivity, fairness, transparency, and accountability throughout the entire data life cycle.
3. Effective data advocacy demands rhetorical thinking and planning. It entails learning how to harness data for diverse purposes and audiences and cultivating the critical sensibilities, persuasive skills, and reliable ethos needed to craft and deliver effective and powerful stories for social change.
4. Effective data advocacy is a complex literacy practice that demands learning in different domains. While coding and other technical skills are important for data advocacy, students must also learn how to not only critically examine data issues in the context of existing power dynamics, emerging technologies, and social practices but also process data in ethical ways and rhetorically use data in order to appeal to targeted audiences, tell compelling data-driven stories, and participate in ongoing conversations about pressing social matters.

Guiding Design

A literacy domain is a specific area or aspect of literacy development that encompasses certain mindsets, abilities, and practices that enable one to advocate with data in meaningful, ethical, and transformative ways.

Data Advocacy for All has designed our toolkit around three key literacy domains in which students need to gain experience to develop the critical-rhetorical capacities to ethically and effectively work with data to instigate social change.

Guiding Ethics

We believe that all students–no matter their computing background, their disciplinary major, or their socio-economic background–deserve to be taught how to use data critically, ethically, and effectively to advocate for the social change they want to manifest for themselves and their communities. We also believe that because data advocacy is pertinent today to so many fields of study, professional careers, and civic matters, it should not be the responsibility of any one program or department to teach the skills of data advocacy. This is especially important in that we know that students from historical marginalized communities do not often engage in STEM disciplines where learning about data and data processing often takes place due to issues of underrepresentation, educational disparities, and implicit bias and discrimination. We thus believe that data advocacy should be taught all across the curriculum in order to ensure that all students learn the skills needed to effectively advocate with data in their personal, professional, and civic lives.

With these ethics in mind, in designing our toolkit, we prioritized interdisciplinarity, inclusivity, and accessibility in the following ways:

Interdisciplinarity: Our toolkit of educational resources has been designed for teachers in higher education across multiple disciplines–whether they are teaching a first-year composition course, a junior level course in history, or a capstone course in the social sciences. In the toolkit, teachers will find a variety of resources (terms, readings, lesson plans, tutorials, data advocacy examples, etc.—that have been either collected or designed by our team of researchers and instructors. These resources come from multiple fields of study and diverse organizations and career domains.

Inclusivity: We have made concerted effort to ensure that diverse students can imagine themselves as powerful data advocates by including resources that represent diverse perspectives and demonstrate how various and diverse communities have used data ethically and effectively to advocate for social change. In order to model inclusive thinking, our toolkit also includes resources that speak into how data has impacted communities disproportionately as well as how data can be harnessed in ways that respect diverse community needs.

Accessibility: In creating our toolkit, we have not assumed that teachers or students have prior experience with data science, computing, data processing, rhetoric, or digital storytelling. Many of the resources are thus introductory in nature, creating opportunities for teachers and students to learn about data advocacy together while also leaving room for teachers to delve further with their students into any given area of data advocacy.

In making these ethical choices, our ultimate hope is to both promote and expand data advocacy education in higher education. We encourage you to explore our toolkit and learn through first-hand experience about the many merits of data advocacy education.