American Government is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of the single-semester American government course. This title includes innovative features designed to enhance student learning, including Insider Perspective features and a Get Connected Module that shows students how they can get engaged in the political process. The book provides an important opportunity for students to learn the core concepts of American government and understand how those concepts apply to their lives and the world around them. American Government includes updated information on the 2016 presidential election.Senior Contributing AuthorsGlen Krutz (Content Lead), University of OklahomaSylvie Waskiewicz, PhD (Lead Editor)

In order to be effective, leaders need a high tolerance of complexity. Beyond this, they need to inform their people and the outside world of their strategies, policies and decisions. Effective leaders are often inspiring communicators – their own high tolerance of complexity helps them reduce this complexity to a concise and powerful message.

Your sensemaking mindset is therefore of critical importance to motivate others to follow and support you. Your ability to inspire and convince is largely dependent on the way you frame your message, and on your skills at playing the game of framing and reframing. You will learn from a large variety of (video) cases and analyse a large number of situations where leaders’ communication and sensemaking skills are tested and probed. This will ensure that you are equipped to build winning coalitions in your own organization.

This is a course about how research knowledge and other types of knowledge come to be actionable and influential in the world — or not. The course explores ways to make research knowledge more accessible, credible, and useful in the realm of public policy and practice, a project in which the course faculty collectively bring decades of professional experience, in both academic and non-academic roles.
The course addresses the politics of the policymaking process, the power of framing and agenda-setting, fads and paradigms in the design professions and society in general, how knowledge diffuses along knowledge and influence networks, and how varied types of knowledge (rational, craft, other) and deliberation shape decision-making and action. The course engages a number of guests to present case studies of research in use (and abuse) in varied fields, highlighting rich areas for potential research contributions, along with major conflicts in public values, political interests, ethical obligations, and more. The resulting dilemmas confront scholars, policymakers, practitioners, and others as they look to research — sometimes — for useful guidance, influence, or both.

Is a good, solid argument enough to make an impact? How would your data improve the stance that man-made global warming is just an “opinion”? How would you explain your opinion on school tests, budget cuts, crime, immigration, safety and security issues? No doubt that your persuasiveness relies on your arguments. But your ability to influence and convince critically depends on the way you frame your message.

In today’s world, you often need to reduce a complex reality to a concise and convincing message. Framing is an approach that deals with the way we convey our message: our words, images, and metaphors. To take one basic characteristic, a good frame engages the listeners’ values and emotions – it is easy to remember and it is something that people will usually agree with intuitively.

When you enter into a debate, you might be faced with frames of your opponents – and you will have to reframe the debate. This game of framing and reframing makes the debate to look like a chessboard made out of words. Of course, politicians play this game, trying to pull the debate towards their own words and metaphors in order to win their audience. But the game can be found everywhere: in the world of business, science, media – even at home.

We invite you to join our journey of learning the game of framing and reframing. You will discover how this game is played, and how you can play it yourself.

This course suits people who are engaged with and interested in public and political debates. Not only people from the public sector will find it useful, but also engineers, consultants, managers and anyone who wants to make an impact in discussions and debates.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"For scientists and other academics hoping to translate their findings into political change, policy experts offer the following advice: Tell a good story. Unfortunately, the academic literature—researchers’ go-to source for evidence that things actually work the way people claim they do—says little on how to go about crafting a compelling narrative. For that, says media expert Brett Davidson, researchers must delve into a lesser known but no less copious store of useful know-how: the grey literature. In a recent paper, Davidson outlines how this overlooked body of work provides researchers a manual for landing on the political agenda. A catch-all term for any research or materials not controlled by commercial publishers, the grey literature is a compendium of lessons learned through trial and error. Long a survival guide for policy advocates and activists working in the non-profit world, now, Davidson argues, it’s time for researchers to take advantage, too..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This seminar is a space for collaborative inquiry into the relationships between social movements and the media. We'll review these relationships through the lens of social movement theory, and function as a workshop to develop student projects. Seminar participants will work together to explore frameworks, methods, and tools for understanding networked social movements in the digital media ecology. We will engage with social movement studies as a body of theoretical and empirical work, and learn about key concepts including: resource mobilization; political process; framing; New Social Movements; collective identity; tactical media; protest cycles; movement structure; and more. We'll explore methods of social movement investigation, examine new data sources and tools for movement analysis, and grapple with recent innovations in social movement theory and research. Assignments include short blog posts, a book review, co-facilitation of a seminar discussion, and a final research project focused on social movement media practices in comparative perspective.

The course is an introduction to the approach of Reflective Practice developed by Donald Schön. It is an approach that enables professionals to understand how they use their knowledge in practical situations and how they can combine practice and learning in a more effective way. Through greater awareness of how they deploy their knowledge in practical situations, professionals can increase their capacities of learning in a more timely way. Understanding how they frame situations and ideas helps professionals to achieve greater flexibility and increase their capacity of conceptual innovation.
The objective of the course is to introduce students to the approach and methods of reflective practice by raising their awareness about their own cognitive resources and how they use them in their practice. The course will introduce theories of learning, knowledge generation, framing and reframing, theories of action, reflection-in-practice, and conceptual innovation, and provide students with opportunities to experiment with these theories in real life through practical exercises in which they reflect on real situations that they have faced in their past professional experience. Through these practical exercises, students will have the opportunity to reflect on their thinking capacities in the context of their practice.

In this set of lessons, students will learn key terminology associated with wall layout. Students will complete a series of activities including a worksheet, group work, a scaled wall layout, and an assessment.