At our Feb. 24 Lab, we’ll be collaborating with the CAA Foundation to imagine a new kind of education reform movement driven by parents. But what are the key elements of a social movement in the first place, and how do they work?

To answer these fundamental questions, we turned to T. V. Reed, a professor of English and American Studies at Washington State University. Reed’s specialty is the relationship between culture and social change. His books include Fifteen Jugglers, Five Believers: Literary Politics and the Poetics of American Social Movements and The Art of Protest. His conversation with Labs Content Direct Andrew Benedict-Nelson follows:

Andrew Benedict-Nelson: What would you say are the necessary elements of a social movement?

T.V. Reed: Well, first you need a broadly inclusive theme, a name that everybody will identify with. Think about Occupy Wall Street’s “99 percent” slogan. That was a brilliant effort to include potentially anybody. For your movement, you could take advantage of the fact that nobody is against improving education.

Money is also important to sustain social movements, but that’s never enough. The more important thing is people. It’s good if you have some sort of existing network or way to tap into an existing network.

While these days people talk a lot about social media networks, historically face-to-face, already existing relationships have been extremely important. It may be that for young people those social media networks are more important, but for most people their social network is their neighbors, people they meet at their job, people they meet at clubs, people they meet at church. Those are the people who they trust most and who are most likely to get them excited.

I would also say clear goals are important. It’s good to have at least one goal that is easily attained to provide the movement with an initial victory, because people like to see that something is possible before they move on to more difficult tasks.

To that point, I would also add the idea of a narrative “frame” that can help explain what you’re about. You may have to work with some existing frames. The media already has some ideas about what constitutes educational reform. But if you’re doing something different, you may have to find a way to break through the existing frame. I think the frame for this situation may be that people think it’s a hopeless situation, that we’ve tried everything and that nothing is going to work. It’s important to come up with something new and clear that can counter the ways the mass media will cover the issue.

ABN: You mentioned the need for early, achievable goals. What are some examples from the movements you’ve studied?

TVR: For the civil rights movement, there was the Montgomery Bus Boycott. That’s actually the point where Martin Luther King came into the movement. That initial victory showed that it was possible to go for much larger things, to spread out into areas like municipal accommodations and other systems of travel and lunch counters. It snowballed once they had that initial victory.

ABN: When you look at contemporary social movements in the context of history, where do you think today’s movements are really strong and where do you think they leave something to be desired?

TVR: They have been strengthened in terms of communication. Communications are much more available and cheaper to use than ever before. That is a space that has been used very well. But it can be used too much – the face-to-face process or the neighbor-to-neighbor process has been underappreciated. That has caused some movements to think that they are stronger than they are. If you have a huge number of followers online, and then invite them to come out to the streets for a protest, and then no one shows up, that can really hurt a movement. You need to know that you can not just connect people, but mobilize them.

To do this, you need more than an e-mail list. You often need education and persuasion. That’s one of the reasons why actually coming out for things like rallies and protest marches is really important. People get energized by seeing that there are thousands of other people there. Online you may see that there are 30,000 members of a group, but you don’t feel it. You also get a sense of momentum from events like that, because you are literally moving somewhere with other people.

ABN: I think that when people think of political change in the United States, they naturally imagine social movements. If I say, “Citizens are working for change” you immediately picture people with placards. But do you think there are any cases in which social movements have actually been the wrong tactic or held things back? 

TVR: It can happen. I think it has to do with the connections between the movements and other forms. Take the example of the Tea Party movement. I think of that as something that started as a sort of fake grassroots movement with a lot of money and political ties. But it grew a little bit and made the next step of turning toward the political process and influence within a political party. That’s not an unusual method. Sometimes it works, but sometimes it destroys a movement.

Sometimes putting pressure on politicians in less public ways is also more effective, because it lets them take more credit for the action taken. No politician likes to admit that they’re being pushed by a social movement.

So there are times when social movements are not the way to go. But I like to think about what I call an “inside-outside” strategy. On the one hand, you have people on the outside of power structures who are putting pressure on. Then you have people who are inside the power structures but are sympathetic and can bring those ideas into the places where decisions are actually made.

ABN: Some of your work has focused on the role of art and literature in building movements. What do you think is art’s unique function in this kind of effort?

TVR: One thing to remember is that very few people respond to ideas alone. They usually have to have some kind of emotional connection as well. Art is particularly important in reaching many different kinds of people. For example, in the Mexican-American rights movement, murals conveyed the message to people who couldn’t read. In some ways a message can also be less controversial if you use images instead of words, which tend to divide people. It’s important for people to understand that there must be a role for rational argument and ideas, but you also have to connect emotionally.

ABN: Here’s something I always wonder about in that regard. I think a lot of people imagine there being this sort of nucleus where ideas are formed, which are then propagated by art and literature and less lofty forms of political communication. But I’m guessing it’s not so simple and top-down as that – I’m guessing there’s more of a two-way relationship between the art and the ideas of the movement.

TVR: In order to have a successful movement, people have to feel as if they have a personal stake in it, that their ideas are being taken seriously. Top-down movements can work, but they generally don’t work as well as ones where there is some degree of openness. There’s also the fact that when you mobilize a bunch of people but then they don’t hear from you for months, they don’t feel as if there is anything they can do.

Social movements typically take a long time to develop. To get long-term commitment from people, you need not only many different roles, but also many different degrees of involvement, because people have very complicated lives and may not have time to work stuffing envelopes. They may feel more comfortable talking about the movement at their church or their PTA or so forth. There need to be many different levels of involvement, and those levels need to be reiterated every once in a while.

Those different levels, including art, are also where a lot of ideas come from. They often come from unsuspected places rather than the leaders or experts, who can fall into a sort of groupthink.

ABN: So let’s turn to the particular problem we’re considering in this Lab. The population we’re talking about is parents, and the goal is some sort of education reform movement. What do you see as the assets and liabilities we might have as we move toward that goal? What obstacles do you think might need to be overcome?

TVR: The first thing that every movement really needs to have is a common grievance. There has to be a sense that things are not the way they are supposed to be. Well, I don’t know any parent, anywhere that is completely happy with their child’s education. That’s a really major asset to draw on.

The next trick, though, is to draw them in in such a way that they think you actually have something to offer them. That broad inclusiveness is initially a huge asset, but it can become a huge liability if the movement just becomes an argument over the form that education reform will take. So the group needs to have pretty clear ideas of what they will and will not support. You need some sense of an agenda.

Let’s take just one example. A universal finding from almost every study of the subject is that lowering the student-to-teacher ratio in classrooms is a good thing. That is a goal you would think people could get behind regardless of ideology. There are a few other things like that, but most issues are more controversial, from how much technology should be used in the classroom to questions of content and curriculum. You have right-wing groups that want to teach creationism in science classes and left-wing groups who want to include more about social change in history classes. You can’t try to please everyone – that would eventually lead to disaster.

ABN: I’m curious about how you would respond to a particular problem that I see for this group. I don’t think it’s too hard to get parents to care about the education of their own kids. But how do you think you get them to transcend that and think about the education of all kids?

TVR: I think you can start by making the argument that the United States is now the most ethnically and culturally diverse nation on Earth. So having an educational system that works for everybody, and not just some kids, is extremely important. I think that because of things like the Occupy movement, there is a lot of information out there right now about how much inequality there is and how it’s damaging to everyone. I think it’s important to remind people that that’s true in education too. 

I think you could also make the case that being able to handle cultural diversity is important for the capacity to get a job. Every corporation in the country wants employees who are sensitive to diversity. So it would benefit kids if they grew up in that kind of environment where a diverse education system was benefitting everyone.

ABN: What do you think is a specific kind of tactic that could be used to raise that kind of awareness or consciousness?

TVR: It’s always good to have models you can point to in order to show that your ideas are actually working. That’s true across a lot of different areas and issues.

ABN: What kind of movements do you think could serve as precedents for the sort of thing we’re trying to build?

TVR: One example I would point to is Mothers Against Drunk Driving. That’s a successful movement that started with parents and tackled a very specific issue. No one was in favor of drunk driving. Everyone felt a real emotional connection when they showed pictures of things like kids that had been killed. They had a very concrete set of goals. It was also the sort of thing where you could offer lots of different ways to get involved, from workshops to in-class training to “scared straight” after-school programs.

ABN: It’s interesting that you have that immediate, fear element there with that movement. By contrast it’s harder to imagine “Mothers Against Ignorance.”

TVR: But you can’t imagine “Mothers For Ignorance” either.

I don’t think fear is necessarily a good motivator. I don’t think it was fear in that case so much as the fact that nearly everyone knew someone who had been involved in a tragic accident. You are always looking for those connecting points between people’s experience. I think you could find other areas that every parent thinks need some sort of improvement, though I don’t know exactly what they would be.

ABN: What role do you think art and literature could play in a movement like this? I’m sure there’s something, but for some reason I find it hard to imagine a “Blowin’ in the Wind” of school reform.

TVR: The CAA Foundation probably has an abundance of people who could think of better ideas than we could.

But using the media these days is incredibly important. The idea of movements “going viral” through things like YouTube has become very influential. So maybe there isn’t a “Blowin’ in the Wind,” but there are certainly creative people who care about education. There are lots of people who talk about education in various ways in pop culture who could be used in some sort of creative combination. I think it would be a real missed opportunity not to tap into the arts.