He also received the Community Hero Award in Education from PHAME for his work with the special needs population.

In 2014-15, Bigham was featured in Portland State University's "Fearless" campaign and was the keynote speaker at the 2014 PSU hooding ceremony.

[22] Bigham was a keynote speaker for the Save Our Schools Rally at the Lincoln Memorial in July, 2016 along with Diane Ravitch and the Reverend William Barber.

Bigham's August, 2016 meeting with Dr. Stephen Hawking included a scarfing for the Portland Timbers that trended on Twitter and was covered by Major League Soccer[23] and Univision[24] and many other media outlets.

In March 2018 Bigham travelled to Bangladesh through Asha Inc. to work with the country's first special education programs.

[35] He was fired less than a year later after filing state and federal complaints against the Multnomah Education Service District for discrimination over his sexual orientation, retaliation and harassment.

Despite being under orders from his district not to, Bigham made a statement to the White House Press Corps following his honoring ceremony saying he was openly gay and calling for the ending of bullying of LGBT youth.

[43] On May 17, 2014, the day gay marriage became legal in Oregon, Bigham married his long-term partner, Mike Turay.

[44] The Oregonian, Oregon's largest news agency, ran 40 pictures and a video of the full ceremony online.

[47][48][49] In June, Bigham and Turay became the first gay couple to ride in the Portland Rose Festival Grand Floral Parade.

Bigham was told he could not introduce a gay student choir at a concert on a Sunday, he could not meet with Oregon Safe Schools Coalition, a group that fights anti-gay bullying, and he was told he could not speak to a local high school gay alliance club.

He was also the current Oregon teacher selected to be a National Education Association Foundation Global Fellow.

Bigham appeared in front of Portland Mayor Charles Hales, along with Cameron Whitten, to advocate for cultural diversity in the classroom.

[88][89] In December, 2015 Multnomah Education Service District was fined by the state of Oregon for releasing Bigham's personal information to the public.

An April 2018 interview by the Chicago Tribune used a quote by Bigham as the headline of the Article[92] in reference to the difficulty LGBT teachers face.

Bigham used this and future visits to begin a series of books for the Washington, D.C. area including I Am Going To The National Museum of the American Indian,[94] I Am Going to the Supreme Court [95] and I Am Going to the Renwick Gallery!

[97] Bigham has had essays published in One Teacher in Ten In the New Millennium by Kevin Jennings and Gender Diversity and LGBTQ Inclusion in K-12 Schools, A Guide to Supporting Students and Changing Lives by Sharon Verner Chappell, Karyl E. Ketchum and Lisa Richardson.

He is one of the NEA Foundation Global Learning Fellows that helped author 12 Lessons to Open Classrooms and Minds to the World along with Fernando M. Reimers, Dr Robert Adams and Kristen Shannon and he was interviewed and quoted in Think Like Socrates by US National Teacher of the Year Shanna Peeples.