Hi! Kia ora! We are Caitlin Mapitsa and Christine Roseveare, members of the Case Collaborative, who live and teach in different contexts. We both use evaluation cases in our teaching and have some reflections to share about evaluation context and how cases can connect students to their own settings, and their lived experiences.
I (Caitlin) am a South African-based educator who teaches monitoring systems, evaluation, and systems thinking for monitoring and evaluation at the University of the Witwatersrand. The student body is mostly mid-career civil servants, so they usually bring significant work experience into the classroom, and in South Africa issues of decolonizing evaluation are central to learning.
And I (Christine) teach undergraduate students new to evaluation in Aotearoa/New Zealand, a small country at the bottom of the world not infrequently left off maps. Because of this, my students often won’t “see themselves” in examples of evaluations in published evaluation texts. An exception is a collaboration between Michael Quinn Patton and local evaluators Kate Mckegg and Nan Wehipeihana featuring an evaluation from Aotearoa New Zealand. The case was featured in a book of developmental evaluation exemplars and in an article in New Directions for Evaluation that explored evaluation thinking and reasoning in indigenous contexts. I draw on this example as well as other local, unpublished examples to introduce evaluation ideas and practice.
Teaching context matters too
Cases allow students to locate themselves in a particular environment, and through a process of analysing and rationalising decisions, to deeply interrogate their context. Caitlin, who has some in-person classes, has found that in her classroom, open-ended cases are a good way for students to bring their experience into a collective conversation about the importance of context. Christine teaches online only. While cases work well as a way to provide examples, the format for interaction online is different and is not as conducive to open, generative engagement.
Key takeaway: Local cases matter
Both South Africa and New Zealand are underrepresented in international scholarship, and as a result, examples don’t always resonate with students. Finding a few strong, local cases is an important way for students to see their experience reflected and to contextualise general theoretical discussions in a way that is relevant to their context. However, in both countries, drawing on additional cases from other countries (for example, the Canadian Student Evaluation Case Competition) are useful supplements to local material. While we both aim to build a primary core of courses around local material, cases from other contexts can also be valuable.
Hot Tips
Hot tips for using cases to engage students with issues of context:
- Help your students see their world in your examples. Use evaluation networks to find examples from local evaluators.
- Use examples of small-scale evaluations so they are something students can actually imagine doing.
- Consider who your students are and examples that might be most relevant to them because of content, who is involved, location, or all three.
- As you frame the student engagement with cases, keep the door open for students to bring their own experiences and context to the conversation.
- When cases are used as examples, using more than one helps students triangulate.
Rad Resources
Check out Chapter 5 What does Implementing Case-Centered Teaching of Evaluation Look Like in Practice? in the New Directions for Evaluation (NDE) volume on Case?centered Teaching and Learning in Evaluation. AEA members get access to two journals (NDE and AJE). While signed into your AEA account, you can access the above hyperlinked NDE article in this post for free!
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