Cognitive Frames and Struggles Over Sense

• In Event: Roundtable Session 11
  In Roundtable Session: The Sense of Education: Reexamining Michael Apple’s Use of Gramscian Theory in Education Research

Abstract

Over the past five years, there has been increased discussion about changing “common sense” notions of schooling through reframing specific issues (Kumashiro, 2008). Undertheorized in these discussions, as well as in Apple’s work, are the questions of how and why people change frames and change common sense. To address these shortcomings, I develop a new take on Apple’s theories of sense. I flesh out this argument through a discussion of the support for school vouchers in certain working-class communities of color.

Argument

As we act in our material-discursive environments (and in order to act in these environments), we adopt or assemble cognitive frames that construe our worlds in particular manners. The ways we put together or take up these frames— how we foreground and background different elements in the world, how we figure certain domains, how we select and define problems, and so on—are shaped by the values and beliefs of our social groups. Once assembled or adopted, frames function as adaptable structures we may employ to make our ways in the world. Furthermore, when we use a given frame, we (re)assert connections to the group or groups whose beliefs shape those frames.

Some frames, moreover, comprise part of common sense. That is, a given social formation’s dominant and taken-for-granted modes of thought (common sense) are constituted in part by certain commonly-held mental structures (frames) people use to figure aspects of the world in particular ways. These common sense frames, in turn, are normed by the dominant values and beliefs of the social formation.

Those who can be persuaded that these frames resolve contradictions inherent in other frames, then, may take up common sense frames and use them to make sense of and act in the world. (This attention to the contradictions inherent in frames is underdeveloped in Apple’s work.) In so doing, adoptees of common sense frames may: 1) ratify the common sense that supports the social formation; 2) shift their identities so they are in closer alignment with the values and beliefs of the social formation.

Some African-American families, for instance, have taken up a market frame for use in negotiating the education field (Pedroni, 2007). This frame construes education as a consumer good to be purchased by autonomous units (students/ families). Moreover, the market frame is thought to be superior to the liberal frame, which construes education as a common good equally available to all young citizens. Seeing the contradiction between the worldview expressed in the liberal frame and the world as they experience it—African-American children are routinely provided substandard schooling—some African-American families have been persuaded by conservative activists to use the market frame to negotiate the education field in new ways. Thus, some African-American families, through appeals to their good sense understandings of the real contradictions they experience, have been convinced to ratify conservative common sense in the field of education. For some African-Americans, this may precipitate a stronger identification with a range of conservative principles (e.g. those endorsed by small government Democrats).

Author

• Ross Emmerson Collin, Manhattanville College