Buenas! My name is M. Magdalena Jimenez Aguilar, but everyone calls me Magda (she/her/ella). I am a fifth-year PhD student and soon-to-be candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I’m a lifelong Californian and University of California student, having received my bachelor’s degree from UC Davis and my master’s degree at UCLA. I am also blessed to have been part of this year’s wonderful GEDI 22 cohort, the Sisterhood of Healing Courage.
For this blog post, I wanted to reflect on one of the lessons from my GEDI experience that changed how I think about culturally responsive evaluation (CRE). More specifically, I want to share how my individual project taught me that culturally responsive practice can happen in the small decisions we make throughout an evaluation, sometimes right in the moment.
Lessons Learned: CRE Can Happen in the Moment
Before my GEDI experience, I often thought about CRE through the larger decisions that go into an evaluation, such as what voices need to be represented, what questions we ask, how we interpret our data, and how findings are shared. One of the biggest lessons I am taking with me from my GEDI experience is that CRE can also happen through the smaller interactions between an evaluator and the people participating in interviews for an evaluation.
For my GEDI individual project, I analyzed interviews from an evaluation of a higher education program supporting students from historically underrepresented backgrounds. I did not conduct the interviews myself, but I had several conversations with the interviewer about how she approached them.
She shared with me that although she entered each interview with a prewritten protocol, she did not treat that protocol as something she had to rigidly follow. Instead, she adapted her questions in real time based on what each person shared with her. She made room for people to talk about experiences that were important to them, affirmed what they shared, and asked follow-up questions when something came up that the original protocol did not fully capture.
What really stuck with me was when she described this to me as CRE in action. Before this, I had never thought about adapting an interview protocol in the moment as a culturally responsive practice.
Hot Tip: Let Your Protocol Be a Gentle Guide
We all know that interview protocols are important since they help us make sure we are asking the questions needed to answer our evaluation questions and provide consistency across interviews. But one lesson I learned is that consistency does not have to mean rigidity.
Sometimes being responsive means recognizing that the person sitting in front of you is telling you something that your protocol did not anticipate. Instead of immediately moving on to the next question, we can stop, listen, and ask ourselves: Is this person telling me something important that I did not think to ask?
Making space for those moments can help us better understand someone’s experience on their own terms.
Lessons Learned: Responsiveness Is Part of the Method
As I continue growing as an evaluator, this is one lesson from GEDI that I know I will carry with me. CRE does not only live in our evaluation plans, frameworks, or final reports. It also lives in how we listen, how we respond, and how willing we are to adjust when the people we are learning from take us somewhere we did not expect.
Sometimes, culturally responsive evaluation can be as simple, and as meaningful, as knowing when to follow the person instead of the protocol.
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