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Dear Colleague-
Welcome to the "Back to School" edition of the Framer's Almanac. Appropriately, in this issue, we feature our latest research and practice on a range of topics, and how to talk about these topics in the public sphere.
Ask Americans what education is "all about" and you get an earful.
It's about...charismatic or crummy teachers, my kid and my school, the need to get back to the basics and a system that has run amok. Scratch just below the surface, however, and you get....a frustratingly shallow understanding of what education is good for, the actors and factors that make up the system, what skills are, how and where learning happens, how we know that it has happened and why there are disparities in educational outcomes. With support from a broad array of funders, FrameWorks will devote more than $1.5 million to research, which is designed to fill in these holes in public thinking, with more than a dozen research reports and toolkits over the next two years.
One of FrameWorks' innovations over the past few years has been the idea of a core story that translates expert understanding on an issue into values, metaphors and policy recommendations in a way that is sufficiently "sticky" to be promulgated in public discourse. In a recent issue of Child Development, FrameWorks' President Susan Nall Bales and Jack Shonkoff, M.D., Director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, described how the cognitive shortcuts developed by FrameWorks researchers over time have found their way into science communications about the neurobiology of development. The core story of Early Child Development uses empirically tested frame elements, such as simplifying models (explanatory metaphors), to fill in exactly those questions where the public lacks cognitive tools: what develops (brain architecture), what derails development (toxic stress), and what supports development (serve and return of stable relationships).
As California Newsreel Executive Producer Larry Adelman observes, "Terms that FrameWorks coined have become commonplace within the field, so much so that few are aware of their origins. For example, toxic stress, family bubble. Today these are increasingly viewed, if not terms of art, certainly as common-sense, roughly understood frames of their own employed by more forward thinking sectors of the early child field. Those of us who seek to translate that science to the public use these concepts as a point of departure, as we have while developing our forthcoming documentary and multimedia initiative which aims to help reframe the public discussion around early child health and development, American Birthright."
Now a group of leading education funders has emerged to support the development of just such a core story of Education, led by the Nellie Mae Education Foundation, Ford Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and NoVo Foundation. Support is currently under consideration at the Charles Stewart Mott and Raikes Foundations. A separate project on connected learning, supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, is also contributing to this work. A foundational project supported by Nellie Mae, Ford and the Lumina Education Foundation yielded a number of important communications strategies and tools to get education accorded a public identity, to illuminate the system that must work to produce achievements, to bring reform down to earth for ordinary people and to explain teaching as a profession. This new effort will build on that work by developing tools to communicate a set of equally important issues, from the skills that comprise "deeper learning" to where, when and how those skills are acquired, to the structure of schools and school time, to how we evaluate learning. Stay tuned, as FrameWorks rolls out research reports and communications tools to help education reformers help Americans engage in meaningful solutions to these issues.
Cheers,
FrameWorks Institute
http://www.frameworksinstitute.org/
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Facing Forward: Digital Media and
the 21st Century Classroom | |
 
Digital media applications for learning represent a new wave of innovation in education for K-12 students. The FrameWorks Institute, with the support of The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, is engaged in a multi-method project to design and advance more effective ways of communicating about the field of digital media and learning.
Thus far, our research has shown that the public and the news media focus on risks and recreational applications of digital media, rather than their benefits for learning. This past summer, we spoke with diverse groups across the country to introduce new ways of thinking about digital media in order to make learning relevant by fostering critical thinking skills and empowering students to be active participants in knowledge creation. New reports now populate our Digital Media and Learning issue page.
Lastly, this summer, four Ph.D. students in the learning sciences joined FrameWorks as a team of Summer Fellows to map how digital media and learning issues are discussed within the larger education reform discourse. Watch that space for their report this October.
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FrameGames
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FrameWorks has been influenced by the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative for many months. That work has literally transformed the way that we think about our work and the tools we can use to help advocates access and get comfortable with new ways of framing their issues. We dipped our toe into interactive media when our research informed the University of Southern California's Interactive Media Division of the School of Cinematic Arts collaboration with the Harvard Center on the Developing Child, resulting in Brain Hero.
Now FrameWorks is putting the finishing touches on a new FrameGame that combines our work on how Americans understand Education with how they conceptualize Budgets and Taxes. Is there a better alternative to the tired old trope that we are "budgeting on the backs of babes?" You betcha! In this new interactive FrameGame, advocates can navigate the Swamp of Cultural Models on both topics, traveling down "Small Think Stream" while trying to avoid falling into "Cognitive Holes," and generally learn how to make a better case for the resources we need to support education.
The FrameGame, funded by the MacArthur Foundation as part of its support of FrameWorks' research on Budgets and Taxes, will preview at the annual Kids Count Conference this November where Annie E. Casey Foundation grantees will get a chance to test the prototype.
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Finding the Right Place for Civic Engagement in Women's Studies
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For the last year, FrameWorks has been engaged with the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) to develop a communications strategy for reframing the field of women's studies. Women's Studies departments represent one of the key intellectual spaces where young people's appetite for civic engagement is nurtured and advanced. While women's studies offer an important contribution to the national conversation about youth civic engagement, their contribution to  addressing social issues is too often muted because of a public discourse that resigns the field to a political rather than an intellectual space. Thus, the insights embedded in the analytic lens, pedagogy and social justice concerns of the field are underutilized as a resource for shaping societal efforts toward helping young people embrace their roles as active and engaged citizens.
FrameWorks' report, "Telling the Social Change Story," summarizes the key points of consensus and best practices among women's studies scholars about youth engagement. Women's studies faculty made an important distinction between youth engagement as a kind of noblesse oblige that comes from one's status as an educated person in the society, versus engagement based on a commitment to a transformational politics that addresses root causes of societal inequities. The latter is the kind of engagement pursued by women's studies faculty for their students and one that is much harder to communicate as part of the public discourse about youth. The report concludes with a synthesis of key principles that can contribute to an emerging reframed core story.
This November, FrameWorks' Senior Associate Yndia Lorick-Wilmot will give a talk at the National Women's Studies 2011 conference, Feminist Transformations. Her talk, The Transformative Communications and Social Change: A Feminist Approach, will be presented on a panel entitled, Inside, Outside, & The Space Between the Walls: Social Justice and Activism in the Academy.
For a copy of the report or the talk, please email Yndia Lorick-Wilmot at: ylorickwilmot@frameworksinstitute.org
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| Changing the Conversation About Sexual Violence From the Quad to the Classroom | |
FrameWorks latest research on sexual violence will be presented at the National College and University Presidents' Summit on Campus Safety this October in Washington, D.C. The conference is sponsored by the Office of Violence Against Women in the U.S. Department of Justice. Because incidences of sexual violence on college and university campuses often attract a great deal of media attention, the organizers of the conference recognize college and university presidents as important messengers and want to emphasize their very visible and powerful role in changing the public conversation on the topic. The organizers see FrameWorks research as a resource for helping college and university professors create a more productive public discourse about sexual violence.
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Around Town
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 Future Policy Leaders Learn to Speak FrameWorks FrameWorks will be in the classroom this fall, when our approach is taught at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government in a course on Intensive Policy Writing for Decision Makers. FrameWorks Senior Researcher Michael Baran will guest lecture in this course taught by Dr. Luciana Herman, explaining FrameWorks' multi-method social science based approach as a tool for promoting public policy. 
Taking Framing to the Field of Practice FrameWorks' Tiffany Manuel addressed the Chief State School Officers this summer at their annual meeting in Stowe, Vermont, sharing findings from FrameWorks' research on how to talk about education reform. In October, she will present to the Superintendents and Public Information Officers for all North Carolina school districts. And finally, in Spring 2012, she will bring the latest research from FrameWorks' evolving core story of education to Grantmakers of North Carolina.
Think Tanks Need Time to Think In August FrameWorks Institute's staff and board convened in La Jolla, California for a three day conferral to assess our work over the last year and map out our course for the next. On the agenda were discussions of the multi-disciplinary literature that supports the importance of Values as frame elements, the integration of in-school and out-of-school learning into the new core story of education and the tension between individual and group discussions on social issues. A special evening at the home of Alberta funders Ron and Nancy Mannix capped the three-day intensive meeting; the Norlien Foundation over the past two years has helped FrameWorks launch its cross-cultural comparisons of early child development and child mental health and has initiated a new project in Canada on the relationship between addictions and early exposure to adversity. 
 
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