Critical Frame Research Articles

Rejoinder to The Role of Empathy in Teaching Culturally Diverse Students: A Qualitative Study of Teachers’ Beliefs

After 20 years, the research on empathy in teacher education has grown tremendously. This concept originally explored in our article 20 years ago, raised questions regarding the type of empathy and its potential implications for preparing culturally responsive teachers. Though research on empathy has increased 3-fold, teacher educators still struggle in our preparation of effective teachers for all children. One positive step forward in this recent line of research has been the centering of empathy in a more critical frame cautioning us against the concept of inauthentic or false empathy, as well as questioning whether empathy is enough.

Framing gender-based violence in multi-level contexts: a networked approach to studying adoption of the Istanbul Convention

International institutions are an essential driving force of contemporary policies to combat gender-based violence but remain toothless if political actors do not implement them in domestic policies. How can scholars conceptualise the transposition of international gender-based violence norms into domestic policies? I argue that discourse network analysis provides a powerful conceptual and methodological extension of critical frame analysis to understand how frames shape the meaning of gender-based violence norms in multi-level institutional contexts. Frames’ normative and cognitive network structure invites combining discourse network and frame analysis techniques that locate frames’ power in their ability to connect different institutional spheres temporally and spatially. I outline a multi-level research agenda that traces the framing processes of international norms and their domestic implementation through gender-based violence policies in the Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention. This agenda includes avenues to study how complex transnational policy frameworks like the Istanbul Convention play out in domestic policy implementation.

Regional and clinical guidelines for prevention and care of obstetric anal sphincter injuries - A critical frame analysis

ObjectivePolicy documents govern how the prevention and care of obstetric anal sphincter injuries (OASIS) are implemented. Thus, in the absence of Swedish national guidelines on OASIS, differing views may be visible in the regional and local policy documents. Therefore, we aimed to analyse regional and local policies, guidelines, and care programs on the prevention of OASIS and care for OASIS-affected women in a Swedish context by applying a critical frame analysis inspired by Verloo. Design and settingA cross-sectional study of existing policy documents from Swedish healthcare regions was performed. The documents were analysed using Verloo's critical frame analysis. FindingsWe found that OASIS was framed as a preventable problem addressed by skilled protective manoeuvres of the healthcare staff. Education, communication, and teamwork were three frames of crucial solutions to minimise the prevalence of OASIS. However, complicating power dimensions between professional groups and between professionals and birthing women were identified. Furthermore, several discursive struggles were found, predominantly regarding the scientific evidence for the suggested prevention and care. ConclusionThe policy documents emphasised that OASIS is preventable, and improved education, communication, and teamwork could diminish the OASIS prevalence. Nevertheless, power dimensions and discursive struggles may challenge the preventive efforts. Furthermore, each Swedish region has the sovereignty to develop its policies, which was reflected in our findings and may imply inequities in care provision. Thus, there is an urgent need to develop comprehensive national high-quality guidelines of high quality for OASIS prevention and care so that all women giving birth have access to equal care and treatment in Sweden.

Multiliteracy pedagogical framework in action: Critical reading in ELT classroom by implementing critical framing

This study aims to determine the implementation of critical framing of multiliteracy pedagogy through students' critical reading skills in the ELT class. This study took place in the English Study Program. This research study used a qualitative technique. Observations and interviews were used to collect data. The data collected were analyzed using data transcribed, encoded, data displayed, and data interpretation. This study involved 39 students who examined critical framing as the third component of the multiliteracy pedagogical framework which was subdivided into four subcategories. All subcategories in the critical framing of multiliteracies pedagogy were addressed throughout the teaching and learning process in the classroom. Four subcategories were fulfilled. This is a fascinating and unique study. The lecturer enables students to think and interpret their ideas by guiding them to derive their meanings from classroom activities. The result indicated that implementing critical framing of multiliteracy pedagogy through students' critical reading skills was very effective. It’s recommended for English language teachers to implement the critical framing of multiliteracy pedagogy through students’ critical reading activities in the ELT class.
 Keywords: Critical Framing, Critical Thinking, Social Contexts, Social Purposes, Teacher' Reinforcement, ELT Classroom

Moving towards empowerment? Rural female migrants negotiating domestic work and secondary education in urban Ethiopia

Increasing numbers of rural girls and young women in Ethiopia are migrating to urban towns and cities and taking up employment as domestic workers, some of whom continue their education by attending evening classes. For urban households, rural migrants help to fill the domestic work gaps created by the entry of urban women into employment. For rural young women, migrating as a domestic worker is an important strategy for achieving social mobility and empowerment. However, domestic workers are vulnerable and largely hidden in the city and we know little about their lived experiences. In this paper, we start to address this gap, drawing on interviews with eight rural female migrants who are working as domestic workers in the city and attending evening classes in urban secondary schools. Informed by a critical framing of empowerment, we explore the extent to which intersecting inequalities in rural areas disempower these young women, and how migration and education become important strategies for improving their lives. We show how the support of social network members is crucial in enabling participants’ migration, yet how this also leads to power asymmetries and exploitation. We reflect on how the ability of rural young women to achieve better futures is limited due to their status as poor, rural, female migrants, yet how many wait in the city in the hope of a better future. Our analysis demonstrates the importance of critical approaches to female empowerment that includes a focus on structural inequalities and power imbalances.

The EU as a Global Gender Actor: Tracing Intersectionality in the European Gender Action Plans for External Relations 2010–2025

Abstract In recent years, the European Union has been paying more attention to social categories other than gender in its external policies. The authors’ aim is twofold. First, we trace how the concept of intersectionality has evolved in EU external gender policy since 2010. Second, we analyze to what extent the framing of intersectionality is able to harness intersectionality’s transformative potential. Using a tailored critical frame analysis of EU Gender Action Plans I–III, the study finds a growing and more profound engagement with the concept since 2020, due to the amenability of the policy field and a changed opportunity structure resulting from the 2019 appointment of a new Commission which put (gender) equality back on the agenda. While not yet transformative in the strict sense, the policy shift is an important leverage for equality advocates as it sets out a progressive course for the European Union as a global gender actor.

TEACHERS’ RIGHT TO HEALTH IN THE POLICY DEBATES DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC IN HUNGARY AND ROMANIA

At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, governments worldwide suspended face-to-face education in schools to manage the spread of the Sars-Cov-2 virus. Romania and Hungary were not exceptional in this regard during the first wave of the pandemic. However, further along, the two countries’ policy pathways strongly diverged. Hungary strategized keeping schools open to ensure parents could attend to their employment obligations. Romania suspended face-to-face education in schools for long periods. The paper looks at these two national cases through a Critical Frame Analysis (Dombos et al., 2012) of education policy debates during the initial three waves of the pandemic (March 2020 – July 2021). It answers the question: How were the health rights of teachers and the health crisis in education framed in the education policy debates during the Covid-19 pandemic? Policy documents and policy related position documents by non-government actors were selected by country experts from both countries and coded inductively looking at the right to education, the right to health, and the relationship between economic activities and education. We present our findings concerning how teachers’ rights to health are featured in the policy debates between the government, oppositional political parties, trade unions and other stakeholders. Finally, we use our analysis to point to recommendations addressing the complex challenge of equally ensuring vulnerable pupils’ rights to education and teachers’ rights to health through coherent crisis management policies.

Sterne’s Captive and the Prison: Double Vision

This essay contextualises Sterne’s captive from A Sentimental Journey in the debates about the form and function of the prison as a penal instrument, which raged in Parliament in 1778. In the same months, and the same city, the captive was returned to public attention through a Royal Academy exhibition in Piccadilly, which featured a much-commented upon painting, Sterne’s Captive, by Joseph Wright of Derby. This essay asks what light the contemporary prison debate can shed on Sterne’s text, and conversely, how painterly renderings of ‘The Captive’ in the 1770s, by Wright of Derby, and by John Hamilton Mortimer, can elaborate the disconcerting bifocalism of Sterne’s prison scene. These artistic stagings of the captive’s imprisoned state insist on the involvement of the viewer in the suffering on display, in distinctly Christian modalities which challenge a contemporary critical framing of this scene as a mechanics of sentimentalist avoidance. It returns to Sterne’s original a host of penological allusions which would have been evident to its earliest readers but which have become opaque, and offers close readings of three of the most innovative and influential paintings of A Sentimental Journey, and the relationship of compassion to inaction.

Is this workplace bullying? How ideas about conflict shape conflict management strategies

AbstractThe adoption of specific conflict management strategies has usually been linked to various factors, such as litigation avoidance, union substitution and the pursuit of strategic benefits. This study advances the hypothesis that actors’ different frames of reference impact how workplace conflicts are interpreted and managed by unions and employers. Drawing on original data from the Brazilian banking sector, this article shows that companies and unions have different interpretations of workplace bullying. Unions understand workplace bullying as an organizational or sectoral problem inherent to labour relations in the banking sector. In contrast, employers see workplace bullying as a problem caused by individual managers. These different understandings of the same type of conflict are shaped by each actor's frame of reference and influence their responses to workplace bullying. With a pluralist or critical frame of reference, unions favour conflict management tools that try to promote structural changes in the sector. With a unitarist frame of reference, employers try to transform individual behaviour or simply remove individual managers from the workplace. Therefore, organizations with a unitarist frame interpret and respond to conflicts in notably different ways from organizations holding a pluralist or critical frame of reference.

Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination

Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination

Abbreviations in Business Discourse

The article is devoted to studying abbreviations of business discourse in the structure of the professional speech personality of a businessman. The article deals with the features of abbreviations at each level of the structure of the professional speech personality of a businessman. The author has developed and presented the structural, morphological and semantic classification of business discourse abbreviations and described the critical frames of the conceptual picture of the world of the professional speech personality of a businessman, which is verbalized with the help of abbreviated units. The pragmalinguistic features of business discourse abbreviations are also demonstrated.

Multiliteracy Pedagogy in Teaching Indonesian Drama Study Course

The findings of this study describe the learning process of Indonesian Drama Studies courses that were taught using multiliteracy pedagogy. Specifically, the theory used in the study, developed by Kalantzis and Cope (2008), is comprised of the following components: (1) Situated Practice/ Experiencing, (2) Overt Instruction/Conceptualizing, (3) Critical Framing/ Analysing, and (4) Transformed Practice/ Applying. The descriptive qualitative method was employed in this investigation. Participants are selected randomly taken from five different classes and placed into a single class. The research data were collected from students’ attendance, teaching materials, paper studies of drama scripts, and YouTube videos amounted to 12 videos. The play was presented in the form of a short performance. The findings show that drama learning can be achieved through the use of multiliteracy pedagogy. In drama learning, students develop a variety of multiliteracy skills, including reading scripts, rehearsing for performances, and editing videotapes of their performances.

Soji Cole’s Embers and its implications for critical thinking and development

Reading literary texts help us develop critical thinking skills, but this fact is taken for granted in literary education by both teachers and students alike and this is the problem projected by the paper. Critical thinking itself trains our minds toward solving a problem and the ability to solve the problems that life presents is the key to success, according to Robert Harris. The objective of this paper is to show that with literary texts, readers and students can be taught to think critically. To demonstrate this, Bobkina and Stefanova’s four-stage model, Situated Practice Stage, The Overt Instruction Stage, The Critical Framing Stage, and Transformed Practice Stage, of using fiction to teach critical thinking were used. It was concluded that the human mind or brain uses the simulation effect as in computers to orientate itself to social realities as reflected in literary texts and that as a result, literary texts are very effective in cultivating critical thinking skills in us.

Ethno-racial (in)equality: a typology of employment policy frames in Belgium

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the framing of ethno-racial inequalities within policy discourses. In particular, it sets out a typology to characterise different policy frames concerning ethno-racial (in)equality within Belgian employment policies. The typology conceptualises ‘ethno-racial (in)equality policy frames’ along two dimensions, distinguishing between colour-blind and colour-conscious policy frames, on the one hand, and redistributive and non-redistributive policy frames, on the other hand. By bringing these two axes together, the typology allows highlighting how policy frames combine distinct ideas about the recognition of race or ethnicity and economic redistribution. The article builds on empirical data from a study on Belgian employment policies. Through a critical frame analysis of policy documents, it shows how the prevailing representations of ethno-racial (in)equality in the policy discourses of the federal, Flemish, and Walloon governments in Belgium can be captured by diverging types of policy frames. In this way, the article demonstrates how the typology can serve as an analytical tool for understanding and comparing the framing of ethno-racial inequalities across political-institutional contexts and provide new insights into how policy frames are positioned with regard to two important dimensions of social justice: recognition and redistribution.

Reported User-Generated Online Hate Speech: The ‘Ecosystem’, Frames, and Ideologies

The spread of hate speech challenges the health of democracy and media systems in contemporary societies. This study aims to contribute to a better understanding of user-generated online hate speech reported by Internet users to national monitoring organizations, in particular its ‘ecosystem‘, discursive elements, and links to political discourses. First, we analyzed the main characteristics of the reported statements (source, removal rate, and targets) to reveal the media and political context of reported user-generated online hate speech. Next, we focused on hate speech statements against migrants and analyzed their discursive elements with the method of critical frame analysis (frames, actors, metaphors, and references) to understand the corresponding discourse. The main discursive feature of these statements is the prognosis, which calls for death and violence, so we could label this communication as ‘executive speech.’ Other key features are references to weapons and Nazi crimes from WWII, indicating the authors’ extreme-right ideological convictions, and the metaphors, employed to provoke disgust from migrants, present them as culturally inferior and raise fears about their supposed violent behavior. The corresponding diagnoses frame migrants as a threat in a similar way to populist political discourses of othering and complement these in providing ‘final’ solutions in prognoses.

“We Knew No One Else Had Our Back except Us”: Recommendations for Creating an Accountability Care Framework with Sex Workers in Eastern Canada

The authors report findings from a 15-month project that focused on the experiences of sex workers who live and work in an Eastern Canadian province. As part of a larger multi-phased study, 15 adults who identified as women, transgender, or non-binary, and received money or goods for sexual services, participated in photo-elicitation interviews. Drawing on a critical framing analysis, findings indicated supports—as identified and experienced by sex workers—encompassed three categories of care: self, community, and collective. These categories are described, with a particular focus on the latter two. Continuing with the care-based framework, recommendations to structure interventions draw on the role of accountability care in identifying how best to operationalize policies that promote health, well-being, and dignity of Canadian sex workers. The paper begins with a brief overview of the Canadian context and the role of supports. It follows with a discussion on the materials and methods and the results. It concludes with recommendations, limitations, and future considerations.

Interconnectedness, intergenerational interactions and improvisation: Critical aspects of curriculum advancement in the Arts

In 2021 Professor Papaarangi Reid, at The University of Melbourne, shared the ancient proverb “I ngā rā o mua”, translated to mean “before we know where we are going, we must know where we have come from”. This proverb sets the tone for discussing the Arts in the New Zealand curriculum, as during radical upheaval and social change as being experienced in the pandemic, we are forced to examine activities to reflect and discover anew the road ahead (Lindley, et al., 2021; Wood, et al., 2021). This is a critical inflection point for redefining the future of New Zealand Arts Education, as it coincides with the current New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education [MoE], 2007) refresh (MoE, 2021). This research informed paper advocates for mātauranga Māori and te ao Māori in the Arts curriculum to ensure distinctive, bold transformational learning opportunities are experienced by learners within the education system. This article suggests the values of interconnectedness, intergenerational purpose and improvisation can dismantle disciplinary boundaries and offer a critical frame to reconsider a forward-focused Arts curriculum.

Sharpening Students' Racial Literacies through Multimodal Subversion

AbstractThis case study shares the experiences of 24 students in an urban high school in the U.S. Midwest who spent 6 weeks learning about, and applying tenets of, critical race theory (CRT) to their analysis of the canonical The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Students created a visual essay reflecting their understanding of CRT in the novel and in their broader social milieu. Drawing from, and sharing possibilities for, merging theoretical principles from CRT, multiliteracies, and the writing process, we/the authors ask: How can students utilize multiple perspectives to sharpen racial literacies through multimodal design? These findings include three points of integration: (a) overt instruction, Whiteness, and organizing; (b) critical framing, intersectionality, and address; and (c) transformed practice, critical stance, and revise and survey again.

Transforming Gender Role in Manjushree Thapa’s Seasons of Flight

This article examines the transformation of gender identity of Prema, an immigrant girl from a mountainous village of Nepal to the metropolis of the US in Manjushree Thapa’s Seasons of Flight. The novel synchronizes the spatial journey of this village girl with her mental and emotional transformation. In course of her journey, she persistently crosses the cultural and social expectation for a girl born in typical Hindu family of the hinterland of Nepal. Particularly, she takes crucial decision of her life independently, supports her family financially and enjoys liberated sexual life. For this, she resists numerous social and cultural restrictions and obligations which gradually transform her as an independent girl. In this paper, Prema’s transformation process is analyzed through the critical frame of David Jefferess resistance model which emphasizes on transformation in perception, material reality and human relationship in resistance process.

Politike prostitucije u Hrvatskoj: kritička analiza okvira

The paper analyzes how social and political actors in Croatia understand prostitution by studying legal and policy documents related to the phenomenon. It also analyzes whether gender perspective is included in the existing or proposed prostitution policies. By using critical frame analysis, the paper identifies 5 dominant policy frames: public peace and order frame, protection of sexual freedoms frame, public health frame, gender-based violence frame, and sex work frame. The fact that prostitution is rarely discussed, and that only a limited number of actors deal with the issue, suggests that prostitution in Croatia is still understood as a taboo. The lack of discussion on prostitution in policy documents produced by the Government, and continuation of the inherited criminalization model suggests that political elites support the public peace and order frame. Only NGOs and the Ombudswoman for Gender Equality of the Republic of Croatia elaborate the issue of prostitution and advocate for a change in the existing legal and policy framework. However, only NGOs working on harm reduction include the voice of persons involved in prostitution.