Public Safety is finally starting to get the time it deserves in the public conversation; but with an issue so complex and fraught with controversy, it’s easy for messages to get swallowed in the “swamp” of cultural models.

In partnership with the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard University’s Law School and Behind the Cycle, and with support from the Ford Foundation, FrameWorks Institute is conducting new research on how advocates can talk about Public Safety to move towards effective policy-based reform.

A new video explains the cultural models that Americans employ when thinking and talking about Public Safety, and explores the gaps between those models and the ways that experts understand those same issues.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Stay tuned for more as we move on through the next stages of our research process.

“In a digital age in which technology is a central part of kids’ lives, leaders in the expanded learning-time movement need to embrace a “mind shift” so that the United States can make dramatic progress by building a system of expanded digital learning, one based on pragmatic changes that acknowledge the ways learning is happening in the 21st century.”

For advocates and practitioners involved in the digital learning movement, the article is well worth a read – both for the content and for modeling how to talk about digital learning in way that leads to wide-scale adoption.

For additional research on framing discussions on “anytime learning,” see the FrameWorks Institute’s recent report on “Mapping the Gaps on Where and When Learning Takes Place.”

The following guest post is from Dylan Arena, Ph.D., a former FrameWorks Summer Fellow and Chief Learning Officer at Kidaptive.

Digital games have been a part of our media landscape for over three decades, and the discourse around them has always been primarily focused on whether or not they were harmful. According to dominant public thinking, video arcades might be dens of depravity, first-person-shooter games might be training a generation of lone gunmen, and kids today might be obese because they spend too much time indoors playing games.

Framing the question this way is different, of course, from asking whether (or in what ways) games are helpful – a question that many scholars have tried to answer in the past decade.  Some of these scholars have even tried to explain the positive features of games to a broader audience with trade books, such as:

• How Computer Games Help Children Learn
• Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames
• The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning
• What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy
• Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World

Yet despite this abundance of offerings, FrameWorks’ recent research suggests that most people still do not think of games as anything more than a (possibly somewhat harmful) diversion–a form of digital junk food.

Compounding this problem is the fact that the commercial games industry continues to outproduce and outsell most new learning games based on sound pedagogy.  Although it may be true that some well-designed entertainment games (including games such as World of Warcraft and The Sims) offer rich learning experiences, have immense expressive power, create vibrant ecologies, serve as potential models for the best features of good education, and may even make their players better people, it is also true that the vast majority of games in existence today do few or none of these things.

So, in addition to reframing our message to expand people’s understandings that games are actually helpful, those of us in the games industry might do well to ask ourselves: how are our games helpful, and what can we do to make them more so?

The average commercial game today is designed for the sole purpose of providing users with an engaging experience.  Giving people a few (or many) hours of enjoyment is certainly a good thing, but in deciding whether games do more harm than good, that enjoyment must be weighed against the (purported, perceived, and actual) downsides of gaming, such as addiction, sedentary lifestyle, increased aggression, and most basically “wasting time.”

What if game designers set the added goal for themselves of folding a little edifying nugget or two into their games?  It needn’t be much: a few interesting facts or a veridical simulation of some interesting phenomenon for players to interact with would be fine.  If enough game designers enriched their games with little touches intended to help players in their lives outside the game, the masses would notice.  And over time, their impression of games might shift a bit, from satisfying but sinful junk food to–well, if not locally-sourced organic produce, maybe at least a nice glass of calcium- and protein-rich chocolate milk.

What do you think?  If you’re a commercial game designer, have you ever built games with an eye toward edifying your player in some small (or large) way?  If you’re a gamer, can you think of “non-serious” games you’ve played that have improved your life outside the game in some way?

As part of our commitment to effective science translation, the FrameWorks Institute is working with zoos and aquariums across the country to reframe climate change discussions for the American public.

Recently, our work was  featured in the New York Times article, “Intriguing Habitats and Careful Discussions of Climate Change.”

Below is an excerpt from the article:

Word choices matter, research showed. The FrameWorks Institute, a nonprofit organization that studies how people process abstract concepts, found the phrase “greenhouse gas effect” perplexed people. “They think it is a nice place for plants to grow,” said FrameWorks’ president, Susan Bales. So her group advised substituting “heat-trapping blanket” to describe the accumulation of gases in the atmosphere.

Since 2010,  we have trained education specialists and interpreters in major informal science institutions to integrate the “heat-trapping blanket” metaphor and related communications tools in their exhibits and live demonstrations. Through this training, interpreters learn framing skills that enable visitors to think like “citizens” when it comes to addressing climate changes in the ocean.

Working with marine scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, we have learned that climate effects on the ocean, including water temperature changes and ocean acidification, are having a significant impact on marine animals and the ocean ecosystem. As we move forward, we have plans to continue working with our partners (including the National Network of Climate Change Interpreters and the New England Aquarium) to translate these and other concepts so that the American public is informed and empowered to act.

To learn more about our current research and recommendations, see our issue page on communicating climate change effects on the ocean. And stay tuned for our research updates in the coming year!

On the surface, attempts at “deliberative democracy” events look impressive. These are events that bring together large groups of everyday Americans to talk about the problems facing our country.

Certainly a lot of work goes into making deliberative democracy events happen: creating briefing materials, recruiting the participants, handling all the logistics and, not trivially, footing the multi-million dollar bill.

But what does deliberative democracy actually accomplish?

We can all agree that educated citizens should decide the course of government, but is packaging this process into a singular staged event the right way to ensure democracy?

In my book Mass Informed Consent, I argue that deliberation can only achieve lasting success when power is vested in the participants. Simply put, when the deliberators actually make decisions, the process works; when they act in an “advisory” capacity—absent real stakes—the process is more gimmick than governance.

The productive role public deliberative processes can play in local government has yet to be fully explored, though the people at Pepperdine University’s Davenport Institute  are off to a good start. They work with municipal governments to create opportunities for citizens to make decisions on local issues. In this era, for example, they work with communities to allocate cuts in order to balance local budgets.

The prospects for public deliberation at the national level are much bleaker. Let me focus on an event I attended:  the AmericaSpeaks’ deliberations on the federal budget that occurred on June 26, 2010.

This process aimed at addressing the budget deficit with public input. Given the fact public opinion is often dismissed for being ill informed, AmericaSpeaks concentrated on bringing people together to educate and discuss before rendering judgment.

The tradeoff in this process is that the organizers concentrated on thousands, rather than the hundreds of millions, who are American citizens. For this reason, while we can acknowledge a direct effect on the participants themselves, the net political impact that AmericaSpeaks expects must be realized through publicity in the form of elected officials’ and pundits’ reactions.

The endgame of this process has power players swayed by the moral force of the conclusions (that may well be the result of selected Americans learning and talking about a certain way about the issues). To assess this critical part of their strategy, let us imagine the reactions of a Congressional representative, the player at the focal point of AmericaSpeaks’ efforts.

We start when a glossy report lands on their desk (assuming it passes staffer’s rigorous screening).  Skimming the report reveals its promise to overcome gridlock and solve a thorny public problem -  in this case, the federal deficit. It goes on to detail the carefully orchestrated procedures, offering common sense solutions that have been endorsed by informed citizens.

As it turns out, the conclusions are not so different from those offered by the Simpson-Bowles bipartisan commission. Now consider what might happen in the most favorable case, that is when the report’s recommendations agree with the member’s own position. It seems likely that the member of Congress would want to use the results to bolster their argument. But before taking this step, they have to make a simple calculation—do they think the report adds value or is it going to be more trouble than it is worth? They must anticipate what critics will say if they tout the report.

We can envision several potential responses from those who have a stake in disagreeing with the findings:

Response #1: Ignore

Public discourse is filled with proposals for solving problem that opponents can overlook as another piece of defective ammunition.

Response #2: Dismiss

Another likely stance has opponents rejecting the findings as the residue of propaganda. AmericaSpeaks emphasizes their practice of educating panelists in the course of their deliberations; indeed, that is the centerpiece of their process. But no briefing is without bias, especially in an age when even the most scientifically rigorous conclusions (consider global warming) can be maligned. Such bias can be taken as evidence of indoctrination that could deceive citizens into supporting proposals they “really” don’t want.

In short, opponents might as well say “let me prepare the briefing materials, and they will reach my conclusions.” To see an example of this kind of argument, take a look at the Center for Economic and Political Research’s “America Speaks’ Misguided Federal Budget 101.” By rejecting the notion that framing is inherent in all materials and debates, and by ignoring the fact that this framing does not have to be conscious or intentional, the deliberative discussions are based on a false premise, namely that “bald” facts can be digested in an unbiased manner so long as participants seek some resolution.

Response #3: Rebut

Opponents may also use the circumstances surrounding the deliberation to challenge the veracity of the conclusions. For example, the striking thing about these events is that they are fun. They combine the best features of a political convention with a neighborhood picnic. In this festival atmosphere, participants are flattered, treated to lunch, encouraged to see themselves as patriotic Americans and pointedly seated with others who share this loyalty (although they may amiably disagree about the particulars). The atmosphere prioritizes reasonableness and compromise.

At my table, for instance, a senior citizen eagerly agreed to trim social security benefits in exchange for a tea partier’s support for increasing certain taxes. If only government were so easy.

This zero stakes process is open to all sorts of charges, ranging from the mundane—that the recommendations are illegal, to the universal, namely that the daily grind of partisan politics admits no such compromise. While the others and I were happy to engage in the hypothetical discussion, we had to park our personal attachments, like partisanship or my political science training, at the door when we bought into the event’s premise.

In retrospect, it seems that the force of these critiques would make it difficult for a prudent representative to embrace the deliberative democracy process, if only because it makes it so easy for those who disagree with the conclusions to dismiss or contest them. Hence, the attempt to short cut the politics of governance runs into a dead end. Put more obviously, the work of governance—persuading a majority of the “rightness” of an idea —is hard.  Confusing a one-day event for the arduous task of citizen participation does not help us achieve this goal.

At FrameWorks we specialize in one aspect of this challenge -  the careful preparation and testing of message frames that are designed to incrementally build public support. The heavy lifting comes as advocates wield these reframes over and over with their colleagues and fellow citizens, in direct contact as well as in social and mass media. This steady hammering makes new policy directions easier to envision over time and can bring about real and lasting change.

We readily acknowledge that the promise of a “silver bullet,” a one-time investment in framing or citizen participation is false. Ultimately, we recommend the tried and true approach of issue advocacy, creating winning messages that can steadily build networks and change minds from the ground up. In this process, designing frames, messages, and arguments that can be strategically injected at crucial points of leverage is instrumental to public rethinking. Reframing, then, is a key and critical tool for advocates to build a legitimate and broad-based consensus among Americans across social issues.

How can child advocates communicate a strong message to legislators to avoid the upcoming budget sequestration cuts to children’s programs?

At a recent joint conference in D.C. sponsored by Kids Count and Voices for America’s Children, the FrameWorks Institute presented a hands-on workshop to help child advocates in this endeavor.

The majority of the advocates in attendance were members of non-profit organizations who work to ensure that all of America’s children are healthy and educated. As such, these advocates need to be able to effectively communicate the importance of children’s programs to decision makers so that these policies remain a top priority for government funding.

To help these and other child advocates, we draw upon communication insights from our latest toolkit that integrates messaging on budgets and education. This toolkit includes our research and recommendations for telling a core story that enables the public and lawmakers to understand why investing in children’s programs is a smart move for our country.

We provide a basic outline of this story below:

1. Why Care About Funding Children’s Programs?

Prevention Values:

“We need to take steps today to prevent the problems that we know will affect the long-term prosperity of our state and country. This means investing our resources today in children’s programs to enable children to grow into a strong generation of achievers.”

Prosperity and Ingenuity Values:

“In order to keep America prosperous now and in the future, we need to remember that child development is the foundation for our economic development. Together, we have the ingenuity and resources to implement innovative policies to help today’s children contribute to a prosperous society tomorrow.”

2. How Does Public Funding for Children’s Programs Benefit Society?

Forward Exchange Metaphor:

“A good public budget is one that plans for the future by accounting for the needs of children today. As citizens, we pay taxes forward, not for the immediate exchange of public goods, but so we can have the prosperous and healthy society we need in the future.

It is our responsibility to make sure children’s programs figure high on our budget priority. These programs are an investment in our country’s economic development. They are the most important way we can ensure that our all children develop the skills they need to become future productive citizens in our communities.”

 3. How Do Early Childhood Developments Programs Benefit Children and Society?

“Brain science has shown development during the early years of life affect the architecture of the maturing brain. The quality of brain architecture establishes either a sturdy or a fragile foundation for all of the development and behavior that follows—and getting things right the first time is easier than trying to fix them later when the child is older or an adult. To do so, we need to ensure that adequate funding for early childhood development programming and resources is available today to help prevent problems from developing down the road.”

4. How Do Specific Children’s Programs Benefit Society? After including the above values and metaphors in your story, discuss specific children’s programs as solutions. Those programs may include:

Children’s Health Programs                                                      Child Protective Services

Children’s Education Programs                                                Child Care Programs

Children’s Nutrition Programs                                                  Child Tax Credit

How are you using the core story on funding children’s programs in your organization? Let us know and we will feature your organization in an upcoming post!

Entrepreneurial Learners Speak Out at DML 2012

How do you know when you are part of a movement? That is the question posed by Diana Rhoten at this year’s 2012 Digital Media and Learning Conference, “Beyond Educational Technology.” As a veteran in this field, Rhoten remarked at the jam-packed conference that, “We have now arrived. We are a movement.”

Rhoten explained futher, “Five years ago, the amount of education professionals interested in using technology for innovative learning purposes fit in one small hotel meeting room. Today, now look at us. There are people all over the world working to make the promise of digital media and learning a reality.”

This year’s conference focused on scaling innovations in digital media and learning. John Seely Brown, the conference plenary speaker, brought attention to the need to not only scale the use of technology for learning, but to also scale learning systems and institutional structures. To do this, we need to think about the needs of the “entrepreneurial learner.”

What is the “Entrepreneurial Learner”?

In today’s fast moving information economy, Brown says we should consider the “half-life of a skill.” According to Brown, most skills today last about 5 years before they become irrelevant. So, education systems should move from a “fixed-asset” approach to a participatory approach that equips students to learn within a flow of information. In short, we should think of learning less like “moving on a steamship” and more like “white water rafting.”

What About the Systemic Constraints to the Entrepreneurial Learner?

The conference also featured students who are involved in projects that foster this type of learning. One group of students from Los Angeles Unified School District talked about their real-world experiences. As students who have participated in programs that foster “anytime learning,” they now have skills that help them navigate the information terrain for learning purposes. However, without wider institutional buy-in, these skills can actually get them in trouble.

One student mentioned his predicament. “If I have a question in class and the teacher is busy, I cannot just pull out my phone and do my own research. That would put me in serious trouble because we cannot use our phones for any purpose in class. But I know the answer is right in my pocket. It is a frustrating situation.”

Communicating DML to Build the Movement

The FrameWorks Institute is working with DML experts and advocates to help communicate this new conception of learning that enables the public and the education field to understand the wider benefits.

To this end, we have two new reports that speak directly to this need. One report, entitled “The Stories We Tell Ourselves: How DML is Communicated by Ed Reformers,” examines how learning and technology issues are understood by the wider education reform field. The other report, “Valuing Digital Media and Learning,” presents the findings of our prescriptive research that finds the use of two values, Pragmatism and Progress, to be particularly successful in building public support for DML programs.

We will be posting these new reports soon on our website. Stay tuned!

Why frame when you can just hit “randomize” on the new Phrase Generator? If only it was that easy.

In the case that you want to create a message that strategically orients people to your issue, FrameWorks can help. Check out our website to learn more.

Photo Credit: Clotee Pridgen Allochuku

So here it is – Black History Month! Schoolchildren all over the country will spend a few days learning about Martin Luther King, Jr., learning who invented the cotton gin, and even learning how to sing an old negro spiritual (no, not an Al Green tune!). If you can’t feel the sarcasm dripping from my keyboard, take my word for it – it is.

Look, I get it. Recognizing the achievements and contributions of African Americans is a worthy exercise. Particularly given the ahistorical nature of contemporary American society.

However, the way it is taught in schools is rather superficial…and is indicative of larger trends we are seeing in public understandings of race, as well as in recent scholarship.

Three new studies indicate that class, not race, is quickly becoming the defining factor in determining life chances.

The first study, by Sean Reardon at Stanford, argues that the educational achievement gap between poor people and affluent people is significantly larger than the well-known white-black achievement gap. Employing thoughtful and rigorous data analysis, Reardon shows that over time there has been a large increase in the achievement gap between the rich and poor, while the black-white gap has decreased. Another way to say this is that even within racial groups, the achievement gap between the rich and the poor has dramatically increased over time. Why? I’ll get to that in a minute.

The second study comes from controversial social scientist, Charles Murray. In his new book, Coming Apart, Murray asserts that there is an emerging white underclass that exhibits the pathologies often associated with the black underclass. High rates of out-of-wedlock births, drug abuse, and criminality, according to Murray, are now common-place in poor white communities across the country. Think of the book as a sort of modern-day Moynihan report about poor whites. Murray constructs a hypothetical community called Fishtown from a variety of data sources to paint an evocative picture of a white underclass loosened from its moral anchors and dangerously spiraling out of control. Why? I’ll get to that too.

The third study is by Edward Glaeser of Harvard and Jacob Vigdor of Duke. Their conclusion, after analyzing copious amounts of neighborhood census data, is that residential segregation in American cities has declined dramatically over the last several decades to such an extent that all-white enclaves “are effectively extinct” and the nation’s cities are more integrated than at any time since the very early 20th century. To be sure, blacks are still more segregated than Latinos or Asian Americans. Nonetheless, even the black-white patterns suggest significantly more integration than there was a half-century ago. The implication, of course, is that place – and by extension – class is increasingly a factor in gaining access to jobs, goods, services, and educational opportunities.

So, what do we conclude about race?

What we know from the cognitive literature is that people are fast and frugal thinkers. They are looking for mental shortcuts to make sense of their worlds. All of the above has been covered extensively in the media. A quick perusal of the Internet reveals that the headlines absolutely make all of this about class.

More to the point, it also is likely to activate the dominant frame about race – that America has essentially eliminated racism and discrimination (see FrameWorks research reports on race). As Glaeser and Vigdor argue, policies such as the Fair Housing Act paved the way for greater residential integration. This line of reasoning is exactly the type of rationale people in our focus groups gave as the basis for the claim that federal and state policies have rendered the effect of racial discrimination passé.

Look deeper, however, and several important things are revealed. For instance, this study makes clear that desegregation has not been felt equally across racial minority groups. Blacks are still the most likely to live in segregated communities. And the more blacks there are, the more likely they are to be segregated. This does not bode well and suggests that we have much farther to go.

Murray attempts to explain the white underclass phenomena as a function of the abdication of leadership responsibilities by the white (mainly liberal) elite. To Murray, the pathologies of the white underclass reflect the fact that affluent whites are simply too permissive and non-judgmental. What Murray misses – like really misses – is the structural change in the economy. The disappearance of decent-paying jobs in the manufacturing and production sectors, the shift towards an information and service economy, and the fluidity of capital has dislocated less educated people from the labor market. Gee, a novel idea, people without jobs and income resort to things like drugs, crime, and instability. Structure, not culture, is the central causal agent at work here.

As for Reardon’s study about the achievement gap, a deeper examination of the study finds the author repeatedly noting that, while income inequality plays a big role in the achievement gap, so too does race. You don’t have to cut the data very far to see massive race-based achievement gaps – especially regarding African Americans. To be fair, Reardon does say that the income inequality/achievement gap relationship is driven less by inequality in and of itself, and more by the conscious decisions of the more affluent to invest in the cognitive development of their children. Nonetheless, given patterns of housing segregation for blacks and the lack of employment opportunity for the black underclass, it is not too hard to figure out that race continues to play a significant role.

In short, race still matters for people’s life chances. The ways in which it matters and becomes manifest is, to be certain, more complicated and nuanced than in the past, but matter it does. As the French say “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”.