Asset Framing

Is your first thought about them
one that affirms the spirit
of the person in front of you?
—Trabian Shorters

If all we look for is pathology,
we’ll miss everyday moments of promise.
—Mike Rose

Like those in the medical profession, part of my job as an educator is to diagnose what’s wrong so that I can prescribe the fix.  In fact, I spend significant time and effort in the classroom each day determining what ails and figuring out how to cure it.  However, this approach to teaching and learning carries with it a great danger and that is that the human mind tends to define people by their situations.  For example, we seldom say of the economically disadvantaged that “so and so is a poor person;” rather, we speak of “The Poor”—as if somehow it is a personality trait—and consequently, in challenging situations (such as a “struggling school” or a “difficult class”), we have a bad habit of defining those involved by the problem (“the students are inferior”).  Which is not to say that a given problem or challenge is not real but “that is not what defines us.  That’s not what defines anyone” (Shorters).

The simple truth is that how we talk about a particular situation, individual, or community matters, and the language we use determines the kinds of thinking we engage in when trying to fix or repair something that’s wrong.  When we frame matters in terms of deficits—”disadvantaged,” “at-risk,” “marginalized”—we are using the language from the investment world of “cost control” and “risk management,” and as social visionary, Trabian Shorters points out from his work with non-profits seeking to address issues of poverty:

there’s a difference between risk management and equity investing…if you’re talking about being equitable, then you have to define people by their assets.  You’ve got to say, what is it we are investing in? We’re not investing in poverty.  Who invests in poverty? You’re not trying to grow poverty.

Or as he also frames it:

When you’re going to tell the story where all you do is point out what’s broken, but you don’t point out what’s working in a culture, well, recognize that you’re inclining people to think that all that exists about that culture is brokenness.

And that, Shorters argues, is where we need to change the language of the conversation.  The alternative is what he refers to as “asset framing,” and it is the notion that we need to start any understanding of a problem or challenge with the positive values and aspirations of the community or individuals involved.  Imagine, he suggests, that at your first encounter with someone new that you were asked to tell that person everything that was wrong with them.  Our immediate gut reaction simply reading such an idea repels at its inherent wrongness, and yet it is precisely what we do whenever we begin our initial description of a person or community as “disadvantaged,” or “at-risk,” or “marginalized.”  We’ve tagged them as fundamentally broken before we even begin, and the result, Shorters argues, is that our thinking about how to help is already impaired.  He doesn’t deny that there could, in fact, be an important problem to solve; it’s just counter-productive, he insists, for that to be the starting point for identifying any real solution to it.

I have found the ideas and insights of Shorters quite useful in my thinking about the question, “what are schools for?” and this has been especially true when it comes to one of the more notorious answers to this question:  the school-to-prison-pipeline.  Again, the insight Shorters provides about this concept is that it all has to do with the language framing it.  As he points out, the “zero-tolerance” policies of schools starting in the 1980s were rooted in the deficit-framed fears about life among America’s urban poor, and soon the resulting increase in suspensions and expulsions placed more and more young people (especially black males) on the streets where their absence from school impaired the very education that might provide them the economic opportunity needed to keep them from a life on the streets.  Deficit-framed fears became a self-fulling prophecy, and therefore, “when you deficit frame, your solutions end up creating problems you have to fix later.  We built the [very] thing that we’re [now] trying to solve” says Shorters.

What, though, if we used the language of valuation and aspiration? As Shorters argues, “if we recognize that poor kids still contribute, then we look for ways to move the systemic obstacles to their abilities to do so…and when you asset-frame instead of using [the earlier] sort of deficit-framing jargon, when you define the student by their aspiration to grow up and graduate, then all the unjustness of the obstacles becomes easier to appreciate” as well.  Asset-framing, he declares, fundamentally changes the entire conversation about the school-to-prison-pipeline as a response to “what are schools for?” and makes obvious the necessary changes in our schools to disrupt this manifestation of systemic racism in our society.

Asset-framing can also alter how we look at the ideas I explored in Why Schools? and Whose Intelligence? when trying to answer “what are schools for?”  For instance, instead of starting with the learning deficit the pandemic has created in all our children, how might we asset-frame the current situation in our schools? We have communities of caring adults and children who are happy to be back in person interacting with their peers.  When framed this way, the challenge facing schools stops being “how do we overcome the loss?” and becomes “how do we support the caring adults and use the children’s joy to address the gaps in their cognitive skills and knowledge?”

And if we stop framing the conversation around different intelligences in terms of limited hierarchies and affirm “the intelligence not only in the boardroom but on the shop floor; in the laboratory and alongside the house frame,” then we will construct classrooms “brimming with a diversity of interests, motivations, and abilities” (Rose, p. 97 & 139).  We will construct educational programs that address all manners of employing the mind, and we will have schools that honor all forms of work.  We might even be so bold as to start paying all employed individuals a living wage.

I know; I know.  That last borders on utopianism in our dystopian culture, and as I challenged early on in my LaC updates, it really is pie. We can only divide a finite amount of resources so many ways, and thus, for the “have-nots” to have more, the “haves” have to have less, and no amount of “lifts all boats” capitalist mythology can alter this fundamental truth about the natural world.  As the pandemic has fully revealed, biology trumps wishful thinking every single time.

Yet, there I go again with my natural habit to frame things in terms of their deficits.  Granted, it’s hard not to focus on the pathology when the problems and challenges facing the entire world right now are as enormous as they are, and even Shorters recognizes:

we have reached a point where our normal set of cultural and governmental organizational systems, they clearly aren’t adapting fast enough for the realities that we’re encountering.  Like, as a society, as individuals in the society, we are creepingly and more and more aware that those in charge are not capable of securing us, right? And of course, that’s innately terrifying.

But then he goes on to say:

If we’re going to change our culture, we have to change our narrative.  That’s what it comes down to.  We have to change the mental models that our brains are using to make sense of the world, because the ones we have right now, they’re failing us—dramatically, you know.  So that’s where, like when I think about our work, I love that this level of instability means we can actually make real progress on racial bias.  We can make real progress on gender bias.  We can make real progress on economic instability and bias, because the answers that we would’ve given 30 years ago, nobody believes them anymore.  You can’t convince people of the old path.

Change our narrative? Our mental models? An ecological paradigm for education and what schools are for, anyone?

References

Rose, M. (2014) Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of Us.  New York: The New Press.

Shorters, T. (Feb. 3, 2022) A Cognitive Skill to Magnify Humanity.  On Being with Krista Tippett. https://onbeing.org/programs/trabian-shorters-a-cognitive-skill-to-magnify-humanity/.