Family Engagement Reframing Institute: Session #1

Sherri Wilson:

Hello everyone. Are we broadcasting, Alice?

Alice:

Yes.

Sherri Wilson:

Okay. Welcome everyone. As you arrive, if you want to chime in in the chat box and let us know your name and which state you’re from, maybe where you work, anything interesting you want to tell us, welcome everyone, we’re going to get started in just a minute. Feel free to say hello in the chat box. We want to know who’s here. It’ll be great to meet you all that way. I see Laura from Maryland. Excellent. Shelley from Pennsylvania. We have someone from Carroll County Schools, that’s awesome. Carmen is here from Silver Spring, hi Carmen. Viviana, from Hartford, Connecticut, oh, welcome. We have someone from Virginia as well. Here we have Kate McKennon, from Pennsylvania. Someone from Dorchester County. Excellent, welcome everyone. We are super excited that you could join us today, we’ve got a pretty big schedule so we’re going to dive right in.

Sherri Wilson:

My name is Sherri Wilson, I’m the Director of Engagement and State Partnerships at the National Association For Family School and Community Engagement. And today we have a fantastic panel for you. The training is going to be led by Shaun and Marissa. Shaun is the president of Adamec Communications and Marissa is the Principal Researcher and Strategist at the FrameWorks Institute. She did all of the research that this was based on. So we’re super excited to have them here. Let’s get started.

Shaun Adamec:

All right, thanks Sherri. Good afternoon, everybody. As Sherri mentioned, my name is Shaun Adamec, I should start by saying I am an adopted Marylander, I don’t live there, but I did for 10 years. Still own a house there and ran some statewide political races there. So I have stepped foot on every square inch of your state, those of you who are in Maryland. So happy to be here. Today, as Sherri mentioned, we’re going to talk about some research that should be relevant to what all of you do to family engagement, the work that all of you are engaged in. First, I want to invite Sherri back to just talk briefly about NAFSCE.

Sherri Wilson:

Thanks Shaun. At NAFSCE, we like to start everything we do by reminding everyone why we’re here. Our mission is super important to us. We really want to advance those high impact policies and practices that improve student achievement for every child. Ultimately we want to live in a world where family engagement is universally practiced to improve children’s learning and especially to advance equity. We are making changes towards systemic process by recognizing and building the capacity of the field. We do a lot of work at the state level. Our state partnerships are really important and Maryland and Pennsylvania are two of our strongest partnerships.

Sherri Wilson:

We also have a project that’s working to prepare future educators and administrators to really look at what do they need to know before they enter the classroom, so that they’re prepared to engage all families. And then finally, one of our favorite projects is the reframing the conversation around family engagement, which is based on a lot of the research that we did to really think about, how do we communicate what we mean when we’re thinking about or talking about family engagement.

Shaun Adamec:

Great, thanks Sherri. So what you’ll get from us today is… This is the first in the series, and so today’s session is focused around framing as a concept. Make sure we’re all starting from the same place. What is it? How does it work? We’re going to touch on some traps to avoid. As a communicator, what are some common pitfalls that communicators specifically in the area of family engagement can fall into. Some perhaps instincts that we are privy to when communicating about family engagement, but the research shows us may be less than helpful. Less than productive, in terms of what we want our audiences to think and feel about family engagement.

Shaun Adamec:

So we’re going to go through some of that. It’s all evidence-based, it’s all resulting from the research, hence we will walk through that today. And then we will surface some findings from the research that will go much deeper into in the second and third session. But you’ll see the findings from the research, we’ll dive deeper, deep-ish into at least one of them, one of the findings and we’ll even give you an opportunity to practice a little bit and apply what you hear today to your own communication.

Shaun Adamec:

So hopefully that is the session you all signed up for. What we need from you today is first engagement. You all our engagement experts. We are going to have a couple of different ways that you can engage with us, but you’re already using the chat, keep using the chat as things resonate with you, if you have an aha moment, if we say something that really speaks to you, that sounds really familiar to you, say so. Put it in the chat. If you have a question, use the Q and A box. I think we’re all Zoom experts by now, but in case you aren’t, there are two options to talk with your fellow panelists and participants on Zoom.

Shaun Adamec:

One of them is the chat feature, which is I can see already busy. The other is the Q and A. That Q and A box is really valuable to us. It’s also valuable to you all, because you all get to like questions that others ask, which will push them to the top and so it assures, in the event that we get a lot of questions, that we’re answering the ones that are most popular, that are most top of mind to you. Also please use that Q and A box. You can use that Q and A box at any time during the presentation, we’ll just bank the questions and then we’ll get to them at the end, if we happen to answer them live, we can go ahead and mark that on the Q and A so don’t worry about asking something that we might cover. Please use that.

Shaun Adamec:

And then examples. I think we’ve invited you already to send us your material, if you have material that you think may be an example of good framing, maybe just an example of framing in general, something you’ve tried, send it to us. So I’m going to invite the NAFCE folks to put the email address in the chat, if you all are interested in doing that, we’d love to see it and we can use it as fodder if you want, for sessions in the future. For the second and the third session. So let’s get started, I mentioned that there are going to be a couple of different ways that we all can engage with each other, and one of the ways is going to be through a Zoom poll.

Shaun Adamec:

I’m going to ask Alice to go ahead and launch that poll and all of you go ahead and you should see that coming up on your screen. The question is, what have been your greatest barriers to engaging with families during the pandemic? I believe this is, is it check all that apply? Regardless, go ahead and choose the ones that… Yes, check all that apply. Choose the ones that apply to you, the biggest barriers to engaging with families during the pandemic. If there’s something here that you don’t see, that you wish were an option, put it in the chat. We’d love to hear that as well.

Shaun Adamec:

I’ll give you about 10 more seconds to make your choices. All right, let’s go ahead and launch those results. And so you can see that while there are some heavy favorites, although favorites I’m not sure is the right thing to call them, they are barriers, all of you or the collection of you have experienced each of these barriers plus some more that I’m noticing in the chat. NAFSCE actually did a survey to ask this very question, and I want to invite Sherri back to just do some highlighting of some of those results.

Sherri Wilson:

Yeah. We found a lot of really interesting results. There was a groundswell of support for family engagement, but a lot of respondents to our survey didn’t think that current policies and practice have kept pace with that. 93% of them thought families should be partners in the school reopening planning process, but only 64% felt like the leaders of the school system valued the role that families played in their children’s success. Also everybody felt like family engagement was recognized more now than ever as a really important thing, but they weren’t certain that their role in family engagement would continue to be recognized once this crisis is over. And a really big one for us was the crisis in the inequities, in our educational system, including the digital divide and the homework gap.

Sherri Wilson:

And that’s the gap between students who have broadband access and those who do not. The lack of technology and internet access were also noted as two of the greatest barriers to engaging families during the pandemic, and 73% said families had limited access to technology and 69% said families had limited access to the internet and they felt like that was their greatest barrier.

Shaun Adamec:

Great. So very similar results frankly to what we’ve heard from you all. It is a challenging time to do just about anything and has been for several months now. But it’s particularly challenging to connect with people, at least in traditional ways. And so what family engagement experts and practitioners have had to do as you know, is get creative. This also could potentially be a time of opportunity. Families are engaged in their child’s education in ways that they weren’t a year ago. In some cases they’re forced into it. They may be doing so unwillingly, but nonetheless, they are far more engaged having to manage the remote learners than they ever were in their child’s education, so in some ways it could offer a moment of opportunity. I want to, speaking of opportunity, take this opportunity to bring in two folks that may be familiar to some of you. Barb Scherr, from the Maryland Department of Education and Karmen Rouland, Karmen, correct me, am I right? Rowland, from the Collaborative Action.

Karmen Rouland:

Yeah. Rolling boat or roll your boat.

Shaun Adamec:

Excellent. Action for Family Engagement. And I want to pose the question I just posed in the poll to you all. We’ve been under some form of lockdown for what? Seven, eight months. School looks different, just about everywhere. What are you experiencing in terms of barriers to family engagement? What’s unique about this moment that makes family engagement uniquely difficult? Barbara, why don’t you start off.

Barbara:

Thank you. And we’re actually 38 weeks into this pandemic. So first of all, I want to give a shout out to all of our friends from Maryland who are on this call. I think our local school systems are doing an incredible job in connecting with families, working with your schools to connect with families, and there’ve been some really creative approaches. But echoing the barriers that we just discussed and really getting and making those resources available to our school systems and to our schools has definitely been challenging, and we really hear about a lot of the issues around, I would look at it as a lack of equity in the connectivity.

Barbara:

And it’s not even just in terms of the devices and the technology, but it’s access to resources, accesses to support our families who are speakers of other languages and necessary having interpreters available for our families and having those resources available for families, especially around social emotional supports for our kids and resources and supports to families with children who have learning disabilities, there have definitely been a lot of challenges, and certainly our school systems are doing a great job trying to address that, but there’s really a need for those additional resources.

Shaun Adamec:

And Karmen, how about you? How have things changed besides the obvious, in particular with family engagement, with connecting with families, how have things changed for you from your perspective?

Karmen Rouland:

I think it’s more people trying to use… I’m the project director for the Family Engagements and Statewide Funding Engagements from Maryland, Pennsylvania, and also I’m a mother. I’m a mom. And I think schools are trying different ways to reach out to families, make sure that they, whether it’s ClassDojo or using email or the social media, whatever it is to make sure that families are engaged, and I think it’s a lot of communication happening.

Karmen Rouland:

And I also think that there’s a low, like parents right now think in terms of barriers, there’s just a heavy load on families to support and be there for the kids, and not that they wouldn’t do that, but there’s so much more on families where I feel like we’ve been saying in the family engagement space that families matter, parents matter, in terms of the education of their kids and now we see that actually happening in place, but it’s just too much, sometimes it’s too much. The load is heavy. And I’m excited about this particular training series that you are providing so that we can figure out what can we do to make it better for everybody involved. The educators and families to support the students that are here. And the children.

Shaun Adamec:

So let’s talk about that just briefly and shift to… What we’re talking about today is how to talk about family engagement, right? In ways that maybe expand in people’s minds what engagement can and should look like. What’s your hope for this work? For this session and for the sessions that will follow, why is this important to do in your mind? Karmen, go ahead.

Karmen Rouland:

Yeah. I mean, I have heard a lot of what Barb was saying, especially around the trauma-informed practices and wellbeing and mental health, I think my hope for this is that we’ll come up with some shared language, shared understanding across all the States during the work and especially the States in the Collaborative Action for Family Engagement, Maryland, Pennsylvania, that we will develop some programming or come up with some concrete action steps for what people can do, what they can take away and take back to their districts and their schools in order to support families and they’re educated to support each other in doing this work. And still figure out their way through these sessions that you are offering.

Shaun Adamec:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). And Barb, how about you? What are your hopes?

Barbara:

So I want to piggyback what Karmen was saying, and really thinking about the situation right now, we’ve been thrown into the 21st century like it or not, pretty quickly. And for the first time, our families are truly in the classroom. They’re an earshot away from what their kids are learning. So the research has always talked about the importance of family engagement, we are really seeing that right now. And we’re all agents of change, and we all have to come together, work together with that common language. And if each one of us can be that spark to ignite those conversations, and I think everybody even participating in this institute is really that spark. And from what we gather here, what we learn here is to be that spark and ignite that spark with at least one other person and then hopefully that next person will light that spark. And then we just create that energy where we really need to come together around these conversations of a common language and working together to support our kids.

Shaun Adamec:

Great. Great. Well, thank you all for your perspective. We’re going to bring Barb and Karmen back a little bit later to get some reactions to what you hear over the next hour or so, but in the meantime, thank you all and I hope you find what we’re going to share helpful. I’m going to go ahead and share my screen again. And so as Barb and Karmen alluded to, the world has turned upside down. It’s been upside down for about 38 weeks now and I’d love to invite all of you in the chat to talk about ways engagement has changed for you, in your world, in your work. What are the biggest challenges? What are the biggest changes? I saw earlier there was a comment that there is real sort of technology fatigue. I can tell you that is alive and well in my house. We have three young boys, at two separate schools and yeah, there’s technology fatigue.

Shaun Adamec:

I’m about Zoomed out by the end of the day. But during times like this, when the world is perhaps focused elsewhere, right? When it’s times of great anxiety, it’s times of high stress, and it’s times of constant breaking news, right? Where attention can be pulled in a number of different ways. It’s more important now than ever, that we are properly framing our communication about things that matter. For instance, family and school engagement. And so we can ensure that, or we can at least increase the likelihood that our messaging breaks through when it is well framed. And so let’s talk about framing and what we mean by framing. Framing very simply is just the lens through which a narrative is told. It’s the connective tissue of the content. If you think about telling a story or reading an editorial or reading news article. Framing is not necessarily the content itself, but it’s the overall filter through which the content is delivered.

Shaun Adamec:

Children are taught about framing by being given a title of a story and then being asked to predict what the story will say. And the reason that frames are so important when it comes to social change, when it comes to things like family engagement or even education in general, is because if we can properly frame our messaging to change our communication, to change the way we, as we’ll call ourselves subject matter experts, as experts in family school and community engagement, if we can change the way we communicate, then we can change the way our audiences communicate, about family school and community engagement. If we can change the way our audiences communicate about family engagement, then we can change the way they talk to each other about family engagement and that’s changing discourse.

Shaun Adamec:

If we can do that, then we can change mindsets. We can literally change the way people think about family engagement and this isn’t mind control experiments, this is simply helping people think differently about a problem and think differently about a solution. Expanding the possibilities of what family engagement could be. The research, and we’ll show you this a little bit later, the research shows that the public generally has a pretty limited view of what engagement is and could be. And so if our communication can expand that, then it can expand the way people talk to each other about family and community engagement. And then in doing so, shift those mindsets, change thinking. If we can do all that, well, then we can change policy more easily. Now look, can we change policy without changing communication discourse and thinking? Absolutely. Happens all the time. Top-down policymaking is something that our elected officials are pretty good at. But those are the policies that tend to be less impactful, tend to be less-

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Shaun Adamec:

But those are the policies that tend to be less impactful, tend to be less sustainable and tend to be less supported. And so if our goal is to achieve real lasting, sustained communication then… Sorry, I’m having some Zoom issues. If our goal is to change policy, sustainable policy, as it relates to family school and community engagement, then we want to make sure that we’re doing it for the long haul and changing our communication, changing discourse and changing thinking can help do that.

Shaun Adamec:

So our goal with framing is not to persuade people to agree with us. It’s not to take our detractors and turn them into supporters. Our goal with framing is to help our audiences access a more productive way of thinking about family and community engagement. What we will show you shortly is that the values, the ways of thinking, the mindsets actually already exist in our audiences. They just may not apply them to family, school and community engagement. And so the way we talk about engagement, it’s not meant to change people’s minds. It’s meant to open a door of possibility, to expand thinking to what I call more productive ways of thinking. And what that means is, if we can, in this case, expand what people imagine engagement could be and the outcomes of engagement, particularly related to student achievement, that can help them think more productively about the possibilities of engagement and perhaps their desire to engage.

Shaun Adamec:

So importantly, framing is not a script. What we’re not going to do today or in the sessions that follow is give you a sort of laminated pocket cards that you can keep in your pocket to talk about engagement and just regurgitate a memorable line or a definition of engagement. It’s not meant to be a script, not meant to be language that you memorize. It’s meant to be internalized, adapted for each audience, adapted for each medium. What you hear today, we hope, and then the sessions that follow, we hope will help shape your communication. So we are all sort of singing from the same general song sheet, but maybe not necessarily in the same tune at the same pitch.

Shaun Adamec:

It is meant to open new doors of consideration, which I mentioned earlier. It’s not a silver bullet. This isn’t the foolproof way of convincing everyone, what family engagement can and should be. Framing is meant to open doors of possibility so people can think a little bit, as I said before, a little bit differently about the problem and therefore a little bit differently about the solution.

Shaun Adamec:

Ultimately, what we’re trying to do is shift the public narrative. Shift the way the public thinks and talks about family, school and community engagement. Ultimately shift the story people think of and talk about when they talk about engaging in their child’s education. And doing that is not quick. What that means is this is not a campaign. This is not a bumper sticker. This is not a one-time thing that if we all just said this word instead of that word things will be better, it isn’t quick.

Shaun Adamec:

It also isn’t once, it needs repetition. What you hear today… In order to be impactful, it really needs to be internalized and embedded into your communication. It isn’t alone, which means it needs the support and the adoption of an entire field, which is why we do trainings like this with a number of you on. So we can not just shift one organization or one leader’s way of communicating about family engagement, but really shift the field. As I mentioned it isn’t a script, it’s got to be adapted for audience and context for… And it must be accompanied by mobilization and strategy.

Shaun Adamec:

So I’m a communications guy, I’ll be the first to tell you that messaging alone is not enough to change people’s behavior, to change people’s mindsets, to change people’s attitudes. It’s got to be accompanied by mobilization and strategy. Our hope is that you take what you hear today, integrate into your communication and develop a strategy to amplify it even further. And in future sessions we’ll share some examples of others that have done that.

Shaun Adamec:

And then lastly, it isn’t blind. What I mean by that is that this isn’t just good writers that got together and thought up new ways to talk about engagement. This is research-based, it’s evidenced based and in a moment you’re going to hear from the researcher, Marissa. You really need research in order to increase understanding, support, and ultimately demand for new and better family engagement. So this is a sort of know before you go and then keep knowing over time, right? That the research produced some really valuable insight, and the goal is to frankly, continue researching over time. So we’re going to share with you the findings thus far.

Shaun Adamec:

I want to talk briefly about some common framing traps, and these traps can be applied across issue areas, this isn’t unique necessarily to education or to family engagement, but they’re common nonetheless. And so I want to talk a little bit about each of them, some examples of them and why they are so problematic.

Shaun Adamec:

The first is crisis framing. So as I said, these are applicable across issue area, and here’s some examples. This is a popular image when talking about the global climate crisis. There’s a crisis in education, there’s an arts crisis. We have a US housing crisis. Again, there’s of course a climate crisis. There’s an opioid epidemic. Anybody who’s familiar with this movie, Waiting For Superman, this was the poster, the promotional poster, talk about crisis framing. Now are those things crises? Absolutely. The urgency of those issues is real.

Shaun Adamec:

And so the message here is not to downplay the alert, the level of urgency. The lesson here is that crisis framing is designed to elicit a behavior change. But the research shows that the behavior change doesn’t last. There’s a reason, I came from this world, I spent 10 years in politics, there’s a reason why political campaigns run on crisis framing because our goal is to get you to that Tuesday in November, not necessarily to elicit long-term behavior change. Our goal, our collective goal is to do something different, it’s to fundamentally changed the way people think and talk about family engagement, and so we need to do something different than crisis framing.

Shaun Adamec:

The problem with crisis framing, or the problem with problems is if you think of it on this matrix, right, where one axis is urgency, the extent to which you focus on crisis, the extent to which you crisis frame and the other is efficacy, the extent to which you focus on solutions. If your messaging appears in that lower left quadrant, low levels of efficacy, low levels of urgency, you essentially do nothing for your audiences. It’s effectively your baseline, right? You’re not getting people excited about a thing, nor are you giving them anything to do about it. If however, your communication is in the lower right quadrant, the high levels of efficacy, but low levels of urgency. So you’re focusing on solutions, but not necessarily the urgency of the matter, then essentially you’re creating apathy, right? Or the response from your audience will be apathy. You’re giving them something to do about a problem, but not necessarily convincing them of the nature of the problem.

Shaun Adamec:

Where I would say the social sector tends to lean more heavily is in our third option in the upper left. So high levels of urgency, the penguin on the iceberg, the opioid epidemic, the housing crisis, but low levels of efficacy. So we ramp up the crisis, but not necessarily focusing on what audiences can do about it. When we do that, the reaction is fatalism. The reaction is, “Oh my God, too big to do anything about it.” This is why you see, for example, some education reformers ramp up urgency without necessarily touching on efficacy, because they actually want their audiences to get to fatalism. They want their audiences to say, “Blow the whole thing up and start over, right? [inaudible 00:10:28] all of those things.” Those of you who are in family and community engagement are about strengthening the system, building on what works, updating what doesn’t. And so this isn’t where we want our audiences to be. We want them to continue to engage, not to shut down.

Shaun Adamec:

And so where our communication needs to be is in this sweet spot in the upper right, high levels of urgency and high levels of efficacy. So the lesson here is not, don’t crisis frame. The lesson here is balance urgency with efficacy. If you’re going to talk about the crisis, then you have to equally talk about the solutions. And that’s, that’s a huge lesson related to family community engagement, but really related to the social sector across issues.

Shaun Adamec:

Secondly, is deficit framing. I want to talk about deficit framing from the perspective of the brain for a second. So there two systems in our minds, right? There’s the associative system, which it works very fast. It’s the system that instantly forms stories or connections between things. It looks for patterns, right? It instantly forms these connections, and honestly, the associate of mine does the vast majority of the processing in human thinking, it does the vast majority of our mental processing, so that’s one system.

Shaun Adamec:

The other system is the conscious mind, which interprets the world and makes decisions on what actions to take or not to take. The conscious mind is fed or fueled by the associative of mind. Think of the associative mind as the part of your brain that’s constantly trying to find patterns or causal links between things that happen in proximity, and the conscious mind is sort of acting accordingly, making decisions based on what it’s being fed by the associative mind.

Shaun Adamec:

What’s important to note is that the associative mind is not reacting to rationality or logic or even truth. For example, I wore these sneakers, I won the game. Therefore, these are my lucky sneakers, right? I ate the leftovers, I feel crummy, that food is spoiled. Or, that family is struggling, I’m not, they’re different than me, those differences are why they struggle. Right, you see these causal links? The associative mind doesn’t care about facts or truth, it cares about speed and reflex. And so what does all this mean, and why is it important? Well, it’s important because as we spin a narrative in the social sector about the underprivileged, about the at risk, about the poor, the disadvantaged, if we begin to, or continue to define our stakeholders by their problems, then the associative mind of our audiences pick up those cues and store them.

Shaun Adamec:

So, whenever we start talking about policies for poor students, for instance, our mind instinctively goes to those other things that our society has come to associate with poor people, unemployment, crime, laziness, personal choices, right? All these really toxic ways of thinking about poverty. You can apply the same thing, by the way, to race, [inaudible 00:37:36] social class, right? When we start talking about policies for Black children, our audience’s minds immediately go to those other things that our society has come to associate with the Black community in really toxic ways, crime, poverty, unemployment. So even though way more Black kids are doing well than aren’t, this is the story that we’ve come to tell ourselves when we deficit frame, or when we define people by their problems.

Shaun Adamec:

When you deficit frame your messaging, when you’re defining your stakeholders by their problems, it’s not just that your communication isn’t having the desired effect, it’s not just that it’s not working, it’s that you’re actually pulling your audiences in the opposite direction. You’re actually drawing your audiences further away from where you want them to be. And that’s the big aha moment that we often get when people are exposed to some of this research, that’s the sort of palm to forehead moment, “Oh my God, I knew my stuff wasn’t working. I knew people weren’t responding to our communication. I knew we had to be doing something different. I didn’t know we were doing our detractors work for them. I didn’t know we were actually digging ourselves a deeper hole.” And that’s really the scary part of some of this work.

Shaun Adamec:

I’ll give you some examples. These statistics, we’ll ask yourself, do these surprise any of you? Black children are more likely to live in single-parent families in high poverty neighborhoods than white children. Black unemployment is at least twice as high as white unemployment. Black drivers are somewhat more likely to be pulled over than whites, but are far more likely to be searched and arrested, right? These are pretty common frames or ways of talking about racial disparity in our country. All of which are true by the way, these are all factual and are important for people to know. Equally important for people to know, are things that you all, and certainly me, was less knowledgeable about. The share of Black Americans graduating high school is the highest on record. More than one third of Black owned businesses are headed by women. 85% of Black Americans feel optimistic about their future.

Shaun Adamec:

So the lesson here is… I want to make sure I’m clear. The lesson here is not ignore the plight of the underprivileged, for instance. Ignore the racial disparities, disparities in justice. The lesson here is not to ignore them, this is about framing, right? So if we frame our stakeholders by their problems, we define them by their problems, then our audiences will do that too. If however, we define them by their ambitions, or we define them by their hopes and dreams, or we define them by their achievements, then we can get to the disparities. We can still talk about the stuff that’s important for people to know, the injustices and the inequities. And at the same time, help our audiences think of those things in different ways.

Shaun Adamec:

And then lastly, problem framing. So this follows a similar trend here. Here’s a couple of example, problems on the left, end poverty, stop pollution, curb violence, lack of opportunity, right? These may sound like solutions, end poverty, stop pollution, curb violence, but ultimately we are framing the solutions by the problems. If instead, we frame our solutions by the vision, by the outcome, equal opportunity, breathable air, safe neighborhoods, integrated community, then we are giving our audiences license to go there with us mentally. If we are framing the solutions that we offer by the problems that we’re trying to end, then we’re giving our audiences license to stay there in the problems and to define even the solution in these really sort of toxic unhelpful patterns of thinking.

Shaun Adamec:

Our goal with family engagement, our goal in the social sector more broadly is to help people, not just change their mind, help people, not just expand their thinking, not just open their mind a little, but to move them to a more productive place so they have the ability to think about family engagement, more productively. It’s not just giving them information and hoping that they latch on to it, it’s literally helping their brains have the ability to do that over and over again. And that’s what we do when we define our work by the desired outcome, by the vision versus the problem.

Shaun Adamec:

So how does this all work? Well, the way we map this out, the way we sort of get to what we’re going to spend the balance of our time talking about is through research. I’m not going to go through this, this is all just to show you that again, this is not a room of writers coming up with new ways of talking about family engagement. This was a methodologically sound sort of airtight research process done by people with PhDs, and in this case, including about 5,300 participants. And ultimately what the initial stage of the research does is to help identify the cultural models, and I’ll explain that in a second, that are associated in the public with family school and community engagement. Cultural models, help us think fast, right? These are those sort of associative of mind, if you remember what I was just talking about, the associative of mind connections that our brains make all of the time.

Shaun Adamec:

If I were to tell you that today I’m going to talk about nuclear physics, I don’t know if any of you are nuclear physicists, but it doesn’t matter, the second I say nuclear physics, all of you are associating those words with something in your head. Your mind is filling in the blank, even if you know nothing about nuclear science or physics.

Shaun Adamec:

These cultural models are the assumptions and beliefs that are created through years of experience and expectation. They’re relied on to interpret, organize, make meaning of experiences, they structure thinking about information, right? If I told you that today I went out to lunch, which of course, in the pandemic isn’t true, but let’s just pretend for a moment that that happened. If I told you that I went out to lunch, you’re forming ideas of what that might look like. Even now, perhaps in the pandemic, you may have thought, “Oh, patio, outdoors, masks.” Right? “Tableware, food, conversation.” What you’re not imagining is a circus or a fire, right? You’re not imagining things that just don’t connect to the idea of a meal. It’s sort of a primitive way of thinking about cultural models, to help us think fast.

Shaun Adamec:

The key characteristics of cultural models are that they are widely shared, right? They’re not universal, but often we get folks, participants in these workshops go, “Well, there’s not everybody thinks that way.” Yes, we get that, they’re not universal, but they are culturally shared, they’re widely shared and this research help identify what those things are as it relates to family, school and community engagement. They are taken for granted, they’re largely automatic. Most of the time we don’t sort of consciously note that they exist or that we are privy to them that, that we are… Even those of us who study these things, cultural models, we fall prey to them also, so…

PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:46:04]

Male :

… we fall prey to them, also. They are highly durable, which means they’re really hard to break free of, to break audiences free of. There are almost always more than one cultural model, and often they are in conflict with each other, right? I can believe in rugged individualism. I can believe that we pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, that we get what we deserve, life is about individual choices, right? I can believe all of those things. I can also believe, at the same time, in the power of a strong network and that we get by with help from our friends. Those are conflicting values, frankly. Those are conflicting ideas, concepts, mindsets, assumptions. And yet, they can exist in my mind at the same time. They can even exist in my mind about the same issue. One will drive my dominant thinking and the other one won’t.

Male :

And so the goal of this research is to find some of those conflicts, to map the cultural terrain as it relates to these cultural models when it comes to family, school, and community engagement. The models that are activated by associated information. Again, your mind is finding those causal links. These cultural models underlie the public narrative. When we say public narrative, all we’re talking about is the stories people tell themselves, importantly, and each other about any given thing. In this case, family engagement.

Male :

And so, here’s some of the models that are at play when it comes to family, school, and community engagement. I’m going to go through some of these more closely in a second and give you some examples. But you can see that this idea of compartmentalized learning, for instance. This is the idea that we do social studies, and then we do math, and then we do English, then we do emotions, then we do social-emotional learning. When, of course, those can happen altogether in our minds.

Male :

I’m jumping around. Crisis management. This is the idea that family engagement is for when my kid is in trouble. Or when there’s some crisis to be managed. That’s the role of engagement. Let me go more deeply into a couple of these.

Male :

First is the tangible triad. I’m going to play a video. Let me know in the chat if there’s a problem with it.

video interviewer :

What would you say are some of the most important things that influence how kids learn?

black guy white hat:

It depends on the teacher.

Speaker 1:

The teacher.

Speaker 2:

The teachers can talk to parents.

Speaker 3:

Everything. A lot, really, depends on what the parents are doing and not doing.

Speaker 4:

Their parents or other important people in their lives.

Speaker 5:

Mostly it starts from the parents.

Speaker 6:

Typically, it’s going to be the parents and then teachers at school.

Speaker 7:

The parents, then the teachers, then the children.

Male :

So, I invite you in the chat very quickly. You just heard, what was that, 20 seconds, maybe 20, 30 seconds of these are man-on-the-street interviews. These are just people found in public, offered a small gift card to talk to somebody on camera for a couple of minutes. These are not experts. And they were asked to talk about the education system. What did you hear? Put it in the chat. How did people describe?

Male :

Yeah, parents, teachers, and right at the end, you heard students. Right? That is the triad. When we talk about the tangible triad? Parents, teachers, children.

Male :

When we talk about the education system in this country, that is where our audiences go: parents, teachers, children. Now, if we are advocates for family, school, and community engagement, why is that problematic? Donna in the chat just told us. Where’s the community, right? Where are policymakers? Where’s the business community? Where are all these other stakeholders that can and do contribute to the achievement and the development of our children? They get a free pass. When we leave education system unframed, right? These are the associations, the cultural models that our audiences are falling into by themselves unless we help them go somewhere else to a more productive place.

video interviewer :

What would you say are some of the most-

Male :

Whoops. So, teachers, parents, students.

Male :

Here’s another one, caring is everything.

Speaker 8:

Loving teachers.

Speaker 5:

Have love in their heart.

Speaker 8:

Be loved and cared for.

Speaker 9:

Parents taking more interest in their children.

Speaker 10:

Just encouraging of the education?

Speaker 11:

I feel like if the parents don’t care, then you probably won’t care that much, either.

Male :

So, caring, as it relates to education and engagement, it prevents … This type of thinking prevents the public from understanding the full scope of engagement and how it can be cultivated, because parents that engage care and parents that don’t engage, don’t. And the onus of that problem, therefore, is put on the parents themselves. And if our goal is to get people to think more expansively about family, school, and community engagement, then that’s particularly problematic, because of course we know that there are lots of reasons parents, perhaps, don’t engage, families don’t engage.

Male :

Perhaps they’re not able to. Perhaps they’re not given the vehicles to engage. Perhaps they don’t feel safe to engage, or they don’t feel able or welcomed to engage. So when talked about more expansively, when talking about a system of engagement, then it puts the onus of the problem of lack of engagement much more broadly.

Male :

Let’s keep moving. The tangible. Again, that one can be characterized by that love in their hearts, right? People who engage are the people who care. And, by the way, it’s also how Americans, and this is research-based as well, describe good teachers. Not professionals, not credentialed, not certified, not experienced, not talented, but caring. A good teacher is one who cares, a bad teacher is one who doesn’t care. And that’s particularly problematic, as well, when we think about education reform.

Male :

Okay. Traditional engagement.

Speaker 12:

I think of parent-teacher conferences.

Speaker 13:

PTA. Parent teacher association.

Speaker 16:

Parent-teacher conference.

Male :

So this one’s easy, right? These are traps thinking about engagement in very narrow and shallow ways. And again, if our goal is to is for people to think more expansively, not just about what engagement could be or could look like, but also what engagement could do and result in. If our audiences are trapped in this very narrow alley way of what engagement is, then it’s really sort of a brick wall between where they are and where we want them to be. We have to help them navigate around that wall. Compartmentalized learning.

video interviewer :

What role would you say school’s have in a child’s learning?

Speaker 17:

Well, for the sort of standard things that children learn, schools are really, really important.

Speaker 14:

With some of the foundational skills, math, reading, comprehension.

Speaker 15:

Math, reading, stuff like that.

Speaker 23:

Schools do a great job of providing the core essentials.

video interviewer :

What about family? What role would you say family plays on kids learning?

Speaker 16:

I mean, I feel like that’s a lot different from classroom learning.

Speaker 17:

But I think that’s more maybe emotional learning as opposed to book learning.

Speaker 18:

Your family teaches you I think your morals.

Speaker 19:

For school, it’s more of like I said, the how to learn, but that doesn’t necessarily instill values in a child. That’s where the parents come in.

Male :

So this compartmentalized learning is…It prevents thinking about how learning overlaps right across settings and particularly between home and school. And it prevents thinking about the role of engagement in the development of critical skills. That it’s not just you do your reading, writing, and arithmetic at school, you become whole children, hole people at home. Those two things are it’s sort of a network of development and we can talk about engagement in that way. Culture of poverty.

Speaker 17:

I don’t know. It’s so hard because some families just don’t get involved with learning.

Speaker 20:

Feel like that all depends on what community that you live in because some communities are bad, some are good.

Speaker 21:

And the suburban families have a tendency to be more involved in the school process then in the city.

Male :

So, right, some communities are good, some are bad. What do you think they’re talking about? I mean, this could not possibly be more racialized if we tried. This is the assumption, the unsaid assumption here is that now communities get what they deserve. And that is a toxic barrier when we’re talking about family, school, and community engagement for the betterment of all, and lastly, narrow benefits.

video interviewer :

What about schools and communities working together, how do you see, how would you say they engage each other?

Speaker 22:

I feel like I don’t have a lot of knowledge about that.

blue collar white guy:

Sorry, I’m really not sure on that one.

beard white :

I wouldn’t know where to tell you to begin on that one.

Blonde white orange:

I don’t know. I’ve never really thought of them about working together. I’ve always thought about them separately.

white grey collar:

Nothing really comes to mind for that.

Speaker 21:

I don’t think community plays any role in that.

Male :

I don’t think the two would work together at all. This idea that family, I mean, community and school are on two parallel tracks that do not meet. And again, if our goal as advocates is to expand people’s thinking of family, school, and community engagement, and they think of the two, community and school as inherently separate, and that’s particularly problematic for our purposes.

Male :

So as you look at these and I saw in the chat, the equivalent of some nodding heads. As you look at these, I’m interested in what resonates with you. I’m going to ask Alice to go ahead and launch the poll, and I’m going to leave these on screen so you’re reminded of them. But what I’d like you to do is select the top three that most resonate with you. The ones that you saw, you heard and went “uh-huh. I hear that all the time.” Choose the top three that most resonate with you and we’ll see where the group lands.

Male :

I’ll give about 10 more seconds. Oh, it’s only letting you choose one. Okay. Sorry. Choose the one. Choose the one that most resonates. Sorry about that. About five more seconds.

Male :

Okay. All right. Go ahead and close the poll, Alice. Let’s see the results. And culture of poverty. Yeah. Isn’t that a shame? It doesn’t surprise me though. That most resonates although you can see some results across all of them.

Male :

So this shows you what we’re up against. Right. And we’re going to spend the balance of our time talking about how to get out of it, how to help people navigate around these particular barriers. I’m going to hand it off now to Marissa who’s going to walk you through some of the research.

Marissa:

Hi everyone. My name is Marissa Gerstein Pineau, and I am a Principal Researcher and Strategist at the Frameworks Institute. So we are the organization that did all of the research behind this framing strategy. And I was actually the lead research for this project and learned a lot about family, school, and community engagement. And I’m really excited to share these frames with you today. Well, I’m going to share the framing in general with you and sort of how, what sort of things did we recommend and then share one of the frames that I think is really important to this strategy towards the end. And then we’re going to get into the rest of them with lots of practice in sessions two and three. So come back after this session to learn a lot more. And I just wanted to say, also, I was really excited to see that while Pennsylvania and Maryland are very well-represented, there are actually people here from all up and down the Northeast corridor.

Marissa:

So I think that speaks to the need for some sort of communication strategies, sort of across different states and different municipalities. And the idea that everybody can get on the same frame is really something that we’re very excited about and is the purpose of all this research that we did. So I’m going to, as I said, sort of share, do a sort of a lesson in what frames are, and then share more specifically, one of the frames that we recommend for this project. And the frames, there are many, there’s about nine or 10 different types of frames that we use at Frameworks, but these are the ones listed that we found to be most effective in talking about family, school, and community engagement. So I’m going to talk a little bit about metaphors and what they can do for you. The importance of explanatory examples, what messengers are, what benefits do, and then values at the end. Cause that’s what I’m going to share in terms of this project. So if we could go to the next slide,

Marissa:

Thank you.

Marissa:

So we are very big fans of metaphors here at Frameworks, and we actually, the metaphor development for this project was really fun. And the metaphor that we found worked best, which I’ll get into much more deeply next time, is one of my favorites in my five years of work here.

Marissa:

But what a metaphor’s do? So they’re taking something that are familiar to people, sort of ideas, things that are out there that people have some idea of how it works, even if they’re not experts, and compares it to something unfamiliar. So this is a metaphor that we developed about 20 years ago to talk about early childhood brain development. And what we found was that when you describe it as a process of building similar to building a house, people who grasp onto that concept and then map it onto brain development, which of course is very complex and well understood by scientists, but not very well understood by the public. So when you can find a metaphor that people can grasp for something that’s complex, that is a really great working metaphor.

Marissa:

So next slide.

Marissa:

So just to show you how these things sort of, as we call it, map onto each other, if brains are like houses, then early matters, right? You have to lay a foundation early on in order to have a solid house. And that’s the case with both houses and the case with early childhood development. What you’re using to build a brain or build a house is really important. Timing is critical. You need to do certain things at certain times. This is an active process. It’s an ongoing process. When you’re building, it’s not necessarily just a one-time thing. You just don’t just raise a poll and say, “okay, we’re done.” And having quality materials early on can affect later outcomes. So if you build with high quality materials, then you’re less likely to suffer adverse events later on. You can weather the storms.

Marissa:

So that’s an example of how a metaphor can work as a frame. It builds people’s understanding so they can really see how something works, not just “Oh, that’s what that thing is.” They really have the tools to understand it. And when some people understand a social issue, it changes their attitudes and shifts their support because when they understand how it works, they can better understand what the solutions are.

Marissa:

So what are explanatory examples? There are another way of making sure that people have a deeper understanding about a social issue. Sometimes metaphors don’t quite work, but interestingly, a lot of times when people are deeply invested in a particular field or a particular topic, the way something works, it’s almost intuitive because you’ve been so immersed in this thing. But for people who aren’t immersed in it, you need to actually sort of draw out the steps of how something works and using examples is really powerful. So you don’t just tell people this is this thing. You actually show people in very concrete ways what it is. And this is a great way to link social problems to effective solutions. So it does similar work to the metaphor, but it’s very straightforwardly explanatory.

Marissa:

So this is an example of how you can actually reframe something from somebody that, again, is self-explanatory to those of us who might be in the field of housing or education, but for somebody who’s not, the links aren’t necessarily clear. This tweet is saying that children in poor households have higher asthma rates and are at risk of doing worse in school. And that might seem to you all, or to a lot of people who are in this field, “Well, yeah, those things are connected,” but for somebody who isn’t, it might look like, “well, poor parents must not be providing good medical care.” Or “if they’re living in bad housing, that’s their choice.” Why don’t they just move somewhere cheaper? So you really have to make these links explicit. So I’ll show you a reframed version of this.

Marissa:

So this lays it out in a series of steps that makes it much clearer. Housing conditions increases asthma, which leads to more sick days, which leads to lower grades. So there’s even more links that you could connect to this. If you wanted to, in something that that’s longer than a tweet. And importantly, it tells you where to go for solutions. So never forget to link to the solutions as well because otherwise they’re leaving people with better, more information, but if they don’t know what the solution is, they tend to sort of fall back on their previous ways of thinking or just become fatalistic.

Speaker 1:

Thanks. And then the other two frames that are part of this strategy that I’m just going to talk a little bit about what are. The first is messengers. So we know from a lot of projects and work that we’ve done that finding reliable, trustworthy messengers to deliver your message can actually be really powerful because people have ideas about who they really think is credible about a particular topic. And sometimes you might be using a messenger that doesn’t have as much credibility as you thought they did.

Speaker 1:

And then benefits messages. So this again seems kind of straightforward, but oftentimes we’re not thinking expansively enough about who benefits from change in a particular social issue. So making sure that you’re thinking of all of the options and then testing that is really important and not necessarily, it’s a lot of times, surprisingly, it’s not the sort of narrow group that you assume people care about, in terms of benefits.

Male :

So now I’m going to talk about values and I’m going to show you a specific example from this project. And again, just the reason I show you other examples is because sometimes I think illustrating a problem with something that isn’t in your own field can actually help you understand why a frame works when in the field that you’re talking about in terms of family engagement, for instance. Plus, I want you all to come back over the next couple of sessions. And so I’m excited about doing some practice with you then.

Male :

But values are something that … This is a frame that is incredibly powerful and we almost always test and then end up recommending for projects. And these are these enduring beliefs about who we are about what we really care about, whether individually or as a society. And when we attach a value to a particular issue, it helps people sort of orient themselves. So this thing is important to me because I care about this particular aspect of my society or of myself. So it could be something like prosperity. It could be that we believe in progress, that innovation is really …

PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [01:09:04]

Marisa:

We believe in progress, that innovation is really important to us and to my country, those are all values that we test. So go to the next, thank you. I also want to make the point that values are really important and you want to make sure you’re using tested values. And this is an example of why that’s so important. So this is actually from a project that we did on addiction, drug and alcohol addiction in the province of Alberta, Canada, a number of years ago now, but we’re still finding that this is really important. Where we did a statistically… Sorry, we did a demographically sample, sorry, I can’t talk for a second, of about 6,000 participants in Alberta and tested these three frames.

Marisa:

So what you’re looking at right here is three frames. One is interdependence, and this is going to come up again in the future, but it’s this idea that everyone in our society relies on one another and we’re only as strong as our weakest members so we really need to care about people who have drug and alcohol addiction. So one group got that value framed message and then were asked a number of questions about their support for Addiction Policies. The second group got a message about ingenuity. So as Albertans, we’re innovative people who come up with solutions to difficult problems, we can do the same thing for drug and alcohol addiction. And then they were asked the same series of questions as the people who got the interdependence value. And then a third group got an empathy value. So this was a message that was something to the effect of, we need to feel sympathy for people who have drug and alcohol addiction. They’re our mother, or brother, or sister and that’s why we need to support effective Addiction Policies. And then the black line represents the people who got no message at all.

Marisa:

So what you’re seeing is that the folks who got the interdependence frame, there was a significant increase in their support for Evidence-Based Addiction Policies. For the folks that got the ingenuity frame, it wasn’t quite so high, but they also supported it. But the people who’ve got the empathy frame, it actually decreased their support for these policies, which was actually the exact opposite of what the folks who asked us to do this research had expected. And they had been framing almost all of their materials using this empathy frame. So it’s actually counterproductive. So I think this shows, A, the power of framing with values when you’re trying to move support for policies and programs, but also the importance of making sure you’re using values that are tested and that are going to work.

Marisa:

So the value that we found worked spectacularly well for this project was the idea of Opportunity for All. So we find, again, across a lot of our projects that Americans do really deeply believe that this is a land of opportunity and that people should have opportunities to succeed, although they might disagree on what those types of opportunities should be out there. But when you use this frame of Opportunity for All, it orients people towards the idea that family engagement is really important, because it’s about opportunities for children and for families to do well. So this is an example of that kind of message that we tested and that you could use in communications. So again, like Shaun said, “Framing is not a script.” So I wouldn’t say only use these exact words, but use this as sort of a model for how you might use the Opportunity for All value. And we do also find that opening with the value, again, bringing people in is really useful, but you can and you should use values throughout your communications if they’re longer.

Marisa:

So this is another example of a tweet where you can use that Opportunity for All value to talk about something that we’re going to discuss next time, which is equity. So to bring people into that conversation about equity and equitable solutions. So again, this is another example for you all to look at and work with, as you think about how you could use this value in your own communications.

Marisa:

So I think we’re running a little short on time and I don’t want to short change Karmen and Barb. First just let me say, this is the entire framing strategy and I told you what each of them, these types of frames do and we’ll play around a lot more the next couple of sessions with these specific ones. So just to give you a taste of what’s out there, you already saw Opportunity for All. I would like you to, we are going to do a little framing exercise, but I don’t think we have time for it, but I do think it would be great if folks would do it on their own and bring it to our next session. So I would love for everyone to… And we’ll be sending these slides out, but think about how you might incorporate Opportunity for All into a communication of your own. Could be longer, could be shorter, but then bring it to our next session and share it with us in the chat box. But Shaun, I will hand it back to you.

Shaun:

All right, thanks Marisa. So it’s a little teaser. We want to get to your questions, I know that we have some in the Q&A box. This is a good prompt as well, if you have a question, go ahead and put it in the box, we do have a couple of minutes. But I want to bring back Karmen and Barb and have you kick us off on the Q&A and get your reactions to what you just heard in the last 75 minutes or so. Your key highlights, any aha moments, takeaways, things that you’re really dying to know more about in the sessions that follow? Karmen, why don’t you go first?

Karmen:

Yeah, I mean, there’s so many [inaudible 01:15:42] I really appreciate this framing, if you will. I think the thing that sticks out for me or aha moment, is just around the fact that communicating to people that they should care, is not enough and that doesn’t seem to sway minds as much as some of the other values that Marisa was just going over. I think that sticks out to may be [inaudible 01:16:17] as we’re raised to care about our fellow human beings and it’s just the amount of undoing that we have to go through in order to get this work done, I think for me is what’s stuck out and taking the time to do that.

Shaun:

Great. Barb, how about you?

Barb:

Well, I totally agree with what Karmen was saying. I’ve had many hours just listening to all that you’ve been sharing. And I really think about how we reevaluate our own traps as we look to re-build, if you will, around our messaging. And I guess, really how we have to expand our thinking and approach things. We do need to change our language. And I think this is a great kickoff, again, as sparks to really begin that process, and I believe it is a process and I’m looking forward to the next two conversations, especially how we’d move in that direction. And as we create those opportunities for all, that really just resonated with me. But we think about how we reevaluate our own traps and change our language.

Shaun:

Great. Well, thanks to you both again. This could have been a longer conversation, but we have a lot of questions and so I want to get to those. I want to make sure that we don’t shortchange those and bring Marisa back into the conversation. And also the folks from Naski, some of these questions will be good for Naski to answer. I’m going to go from top to bottom. I will invite all of you of course to obviously submit a question, but also if there’s a question there that really resonates with you, click that little thumbs up button, it will move the question to the top so we can make sure that we’re answering the most popular ones. I’ll start first. What kinds of questions can we ask families when we engage with them, for example a drop off or a pickup, to help understand where the family comfort level is with family education engagement, as well as their educational learning expectations for their child? Someone at Naski want to take this first?

Sherri:

Yeah, sure. I will give it a shot. I think Karmen might also be able to contribute to this one, but I think that the most important thing is to start with asking families, what are your goals for your child? I mean, that’s a simple conversation that a lot of people don’t have with families. So starting there is a great place. And then also asking families, what do you see your child struggling with and what do you need help with to help them at home? Are also good questions to ask them. It’s important also to ask families, what are your expectations for us this year in terms of how we’re working with your child and how can we help you? Karmen, do you know of any others?

Karmen:

I mean, those were all great. I was actually going to start with, what help do you need? I mean, do you have everything you need? What, what can I do? What help do you need? I mean, I think that goes a long ways in building relationships and trust. And I think someone said in the comments that, “That’s where this starts.” Is people feeling like they can trust each other.

Shaun:

Great. All right, thank you. Let’s keep going. Another question, can we brainstorm more positive forward thinking ways of referring to communities we hope to engage? Many of us would commit to using better language if we had it available together I bet we can create that. I think this is a great point. What I would say is Tracy, I would invite you to do some of that brainstorming in your own… Among your colleagues. That can be a really valuable experience to encourage adoption of the new language. And you’re right. Those kinds of brainstorms are always better when done with groups. I always use the example, I had the… This is a reference that all you Marylanders will understand. I had the great privilege of working with the former Senator Barbara Mikulski. And she used to reprimand us whenever we referred to voters or constituents, she called them moms and dads.

Shaun:

Just using that more relatable language, underprivileged or those of us that weren’t born into wealth. Those of us, you notice that the nuance there? There are subtle ways of just changing the way we talk about communities that can make them certainly less offensive, less deficit framed, but also more relatable and more us than they, and that’s really the goal is to prevent our audiences from slipping into that us and them mindset and instead, almost default to a us mindset, not they. Any others want to jump in on this before we… All right. How can community be more involved in the work with families when we discuss family community engagement? What is the typical definition of community? Is it nonprofit organizations, government agencies, community volunteers, I struggle with understanding why the power of the individuals and organizations in our communities are so underutilized when we aren’t working with families in crisis. Marisa, I saw you nodding your head.

Marisa:

Yeah. I mean, that was an interesting finding when we did the initial work for this is that people’s idea of what community is, is very far flung. Sometimes people say their families are their communities. Sometimes they say their neighborhood is their community. Sometimes the world is their community. So I think definitely putting some parameters around what you mean by community, whenever you’re talking about community engagement is a good idea. And I do think using examples that people might be more familiar with, but haven’t considered engagement would be really useful. So you saw in that video, people are like, “Oh, I never thought of community and schools or families working together.” But I think that there are examples that if you continue to ask people, they can kind of get to, “Oh yeah. You know, I remember that my child’s school partnered with X, Y, and Z community organization.” So using examples to kind of like that, to pull people in and then helping expand their understanding of what community is and how this engagement can happen with newer examples would be a good way to do it.

Shaun:

It’s a really good example of… I appreciate the question, what do we mean by community? When it comes to framing, it almost doesn’t matter. It’s what our audience thinks when they think of community. And so bridging that gap is really the goal here. If you’re unsure of what you mean as a messenger about community and equally unsure about what your audiences think when it comes to community, then you better be sure to be defining it explicitly when you say it, to make sure that they’re not falling back into those cultural models, they’re falling back into those assumptions.

Shaun:

When we tell an incomplete story, our audiences fill in the gaps on their own. And what they use to fill in those gaps are the assumptions, the values, the mindsets, the concepts that are available to them. And so we want to rob them of that ability. We want to fill in as many of those gaps with our initial communication. So we’re helping them avoid, helping our audiences avoid defaulting back into those toxic mindsets. All right. Question for next session on equity, how do we begin the conversation respectfully and inclusively when it comes to equity, when not everyone agrees that equity is a goal? I know Marisa, you’re going to dive deeper into equity in the next session, but do you want to just touch on this one?

Marisa:

Yeah. I mean, I think there’s several things going on here. So, I mean, one of them is, what is equity? Which goes back to the community conversation. So when you say equity don’t necessarily know what you mean. So a lot of what we’re going to talk about is just defining what it is and then showing really clear examples. And I think a lot of times when you do that, you can push past people’s initial barrier to something that they think might be a zero sum game of we give this group the access to these things, because they need more, you’re taking away from us, but when you give people really clear examples of what it looks like a lot of times that can allay some of those fears. And we saw that it raises people’s support for equitable policies. We saw that really clearly in our research.

Marisa:

So it is a tough one and something that I thought of when I first saw that question too, was that framing is not and Shaun talked about this, it’s not a one time thing. Some people the light bulb goes off and you’ve changed the way they thought about something immediately, but that is very rare. Generally, you need to be framing over and over again. You need to think about who your audiences are, but it works best in high doses. So the more you do it and the more the field is doing the same thing, the more impact it will have more quickly.

Shaun:

Yeah. It can be easy to… This is a common question, right? Well, not everybody agrees that equity is the goal. I think it’s important to dissect that a little bit, that the people who we think do not see equity as a goal largely the reason is, because they see equity as a zero sum game. That if there’s some population that’s going to get more, it means my population has to give something up. And so, again, your job is to rob them of that license to sit in that mindset. I often use an example from the Stanford Social Innovation Review, which talked about racial injustice, by first talking about justice when it comes to people with disabilities. They talked about curb cuts, those dips in the sidewalk that were a result of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Shaun:

The article told the story of what happened with curb cuts, that when they were universally implemented, it turned out it wasn’t just people in wheelchairs that benefited from them, moms pushing strollers, delivery people with service cards. It turned out that an innovation that was universally applied in order to increase access for one group, actually helped everyone enter racial justice. And so it’s a way of, again, using that example to rob people of the ability of immediately jumping to zero sum thinking. And so if you know that that’s the barrier upfront, then break through that barrier first, get people to difficult conversations about racial equity versus starting with difficult conversations about racial equity. We’re leading them to it.

Shaun:

That’s part of the goal and Marisa is going to talk a lot more about equity in the next sessions. We have maybe one more. It’s one thing to acknowledge what family engagement can and should look like, but it’s quite a different thing to feel comfortable with all the options and willing to let parents take the lead. How do we learn to feel comfortable letting it evolve without being in the driver’s seat? Sherri?

Sherri:

Oh yeah, sure. This is a really tough one, because this is about shared power. It comes back to what you said earlier Shaun about being afraid of that zero sum game like, “If I give up some of my power for you, so you can have some power, then I’m losing something.” We really have to recognize that we shouldn’t all think of ourselves as being the only person who is responsible for a child’s success. And that when we work together, we have a better opportunity. We all have strengths and resources we can draw on. And so recognizing that families have strengths and resources that you might be missing, is a really important part of that. You have to be willing to share some of the power that you have and let families have a seat at the table in making decisions about what’s happening with their children in the school.

Shaun:

Great. I want to be respectful of everybody’s time. We are at time. I apologize that we didn’t get to all the questions. Hopefully this was informative for all of you. I want to thank you for your questions and for engaging. And before you go look at the chat, Alice has just shared a link for a quick survey. Please take that it does help us develop future sessions. Thank you, and until next time.

PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [01:30:49]