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Dear Colleague,  How can strategic framing widen the possibilities for broad social change in a region? The FrameWorks Institute is working with Mississippi issue advocates and social change leaders to reframe the public discourse on issues related to education, early childhood development, and race.
With support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation the FrameWorks Institute is in the middle of a multi-year project that involves an intensive research inquiry and the production of a set of evidence-based communication tools that will be used to train Mississippi leaders in using communications to support community change. Three new reports are now available on the FrameWorks Institute site.
The first report, "Telling New Stories in Mississippi to Inspire Engagement and Change: A FrameWorks MessageMemo," synthesizes our research and recommends strategies to communicate more effectively on education, early childhood development, and race in Mississippi. Understanding patterns of public thinking and key communication challenges on these issues can help advocates tell a "New Mississippi Story." The second report, "'Her Daughter Was One of Them': How Personal Narratives Attach to Public Issues in Mississippi News Coverage," examines newspaper reporting in Mississippi on five general subject areas: race and racism, education, health and health care, child development, and children's health and wellbeing. Individual explanations for problems and outcomes dominated the coverage, obscuring structural problems that shape those outcomes. FrameWorks researchers conclude that there is an important opportunity for advocates and experts working in these issue areas to move coverage in more contextualized directions. The third report, "Appealing to Mississippi Values: Identifying Values that Elevate Support for Education Reform and for Addressing Racial Disparities in Mississippi," examines the state of education, race policy preferences, and communications in Mississippi -- a state with some of the most severe racial disparity and education performance in the nation. More specifically, it presents findings from two experimental studies in the report.
We hope this new work contributes to your thinking and strategy!
FrameWorks www.frameworksinstitute.org
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Mississippi: Moving Forward
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Throughout 2011, the FrameWorks Institute will be researching how Mississippians think about their roles as community members/leaders and the extent to which their understanding of those roles can reshape their engagement with education advocacy. With support from the Kellogg Foundation, our task then will be to refine a series of collaborative learning projects that deepen the work of social change leaders by expanding their capacity to tell more effective stories about their communities and the ways education reform efforts might help.
This project grew out of FrameWorks' previous work for Kellogg in the Delta Region in partnership with the Institute for Community Peace. That work, based on the harvesting and analysis of the stories people tell in the region, revealed the challenges--and necessities--of community engagement as part of the region's re-emergence. It also revealed that residents were searching for vehicles to create community, despite a strong sense of resignation and inertia around the possibility of improving conditions that impede regional progress.
This duality between collective inertia and an imperative for action has the potential to swallow the efforts of social change leaders if they aren't provided with additional messaging tools to address community challenges, particularly for issues that seem to be of greatest concern to residents: youth and education.
Read more about our next steps in Mississippi here, including FrameWorks' latest innovation in its methods -- structured discovery ethnography.
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A group of Mississippi advocates reports what they have learned at a FrameWorks training session.
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Interview with Linda Bowen of ICP
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FrameWorks Senior Associate Jane Feinberg recently sat down with Linda Bowen, executive director of the Institute for Community Peace and a long-term FrameWorks Fellow, to talk about the unique rewards and challenges of doing grass-roots development work on the ground in Mississippi.  JF: How does ICP's work relate to issue framing? LB: ICP typically spends a lot of time on the ground trying to understand the issues that are facing a community. In this case, we knew that the Kellogg Foundation was interested in education, and so we have been trying to discern whether education could be used as a lever to engage communities. We wanted FrameWorks' help on this because of its methodology around mapping the terrain of a social issue. Our hope is that, once we have some information about how people in Mississippi understand education, we can design a strategy to support community engagement around that issue.
To read the complete interview, click here. |
Youth Violence FrameByte:
Out of Whack with the Facts
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 While the incidence of youth violence has significantly abated over the last fifteen years, it remains a cultural, political and social dilemma that continues to dominate public discourse. What makes this issue so durable, despite improvements in the overall trends? What accounts for its seeming immunity from factual analysis? Why are "true facts" discounted in favor of old realities? This FrameByte, sponsored by the California Endowment and written by FrameWorks Senior Associate Diane Benjamin and Senior Fellow Frank Gilliam, Jr., provides an opportunity for us to consider how the pictures in our heads drive the discourse, trumping, twisting and triumphing over all information to the contrary. |
On the FrameWorks Night Table
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Another selection from the framing-related books stacked on our night tables. We invite submissions from colleagues in the field -- read a good book about framing lately?
Yndia Lorick-Wilmot, Senior Associate
Mills, C. Wright. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 1959/2000.
Some books deserve the title of classics. This is one. Despite the passage of 52 years, the problems that C. Wright Mills identified in The Sociological Imagination remain highly relevant to anyone who must frame social problems in a highly individualized discourse. Mills argues that, in order to develop a comprehensive understanding of endemic social problems, the public must first learn to differentiate between personal ordeals and public policies. He calls this distinction "the personal troubles of milieu" versus "the public issues of social structure." These public structures, he says, "overlap and interpenetrate to form the larger structure of social and historical life" (1959:8).
By acquiring more of a sociological imagination, he argues, people will be able to understand individual outcomes within the broader context of shared, public fates. In Mills' own words, with the sociological imagination, the public will be able to better cope "with their personal troubles in such ways as to control the structural transformations that usually lie behind them" (1959:12). FrameWorks would argue that, in a culture that is highly oriented to individual explanations for structural problems, advocates must work overtime to balance that equation with frames that underscore the interactivity between individuals and the places and forces that shape them.
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- "Science Does Not Speak for Itself: Translating Child Development Research for the Public and Its Policymakers" is the topic of an article in the January/February issue of Child Development features (Volume 82, Number 1, pages 17-32) co-authored by FrameWorks President Susan Bales and Jack Shonkoff, director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard.
Click here to read the article
- FrameWorks Senior researcher Michael Erard's article "Dreaming in English" was featured in this Sunday's New York Times. In the article, Erard examines "the popular notion that you've reached a linguistic milestone when you start dreaming in a foreign language."
Check out the article here, and keep your eyes open for his forthcoming book on hyperpolyglots and other talented language learners.
Click here to order a full copy of the journal.
- FrameWorks is delighted to see its work in circulation!
The public policy and advocacy organization Demos reports it has found the simplifying model that FrameWorks developed -- public structures -- very effective in helping engage advocates in reframing conversations about government.
Check out FrameWorks' MessageMemo on "How to Talk About Government," here.
The Society for Research in Child Development  recently issued a summary "Healthy Development: A Summit on Young Children's Mental Health," which used FrameWorks' latest research on child mental health to structure the conversation. Summit organizers have gone on to brief legislators, using findings and recommendations from FrameWorks' research conducted for the Harvard Center on the Developing Child.
Don't miss FrameWorks' new MessageMemo on child mental
health and related toolkit.
- A group of Washington, DC-based FrameWorkers recently attended the premiere of Dave Zirin's documentary Not Just a Game, which examines the long history of mixing politics and sports. The event was a Teaching for Change 20th anniversary fundraiser at Busboys and Poets in DC. Like FrameWorks, Teaching for Change has received a grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to help promote community change in Mississippi (Photo © Rick Reinhard 2010).
 | | (From left to right) FrameWorkers Robert Shore, Tia Remington-Bell, Tiffany Manuel and Suzanne Lo |
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