A warm hello from Los Angeles! We are Drs. Stewart Donaldson, Ashaki Jackson, and John LaVelle – the AEA Graduate Education Diversity Internship (GEDI) program leadership team. This week, the AEA365 blog will feature insights from our 12th cohort, self-named Funtunfunefu Denkyemfunefu (Unity in Diversity), whose internship sites spanned from California to Maryland. Before we begin, we’d like to describe the program and how you can help.
The program engages and supports masters and doctoral students from groups that are traditionally under-represented in the field of evaluation and reflect many of the new communities in which evaluations occur. The program introduces evaluative thinking in scholars from variety of disciplines and is centered on the principles of culturally responsive evaluation. Scholars receive three levels of mentoring (from leadership, AEA theorists and practitioners, and site supervisors) throughout the academic year. Further, they participate in field training and professional development opportunities, including the Claremont Evaluation Center’s Professional Development Workshop Series, Center for Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment (CREA) conference, AEA’s annual conference, a winter seminar, and the AEA Summer Institute in Atlanta. Interns also participate in monthly webinars, network with established theorists and practitioners, and complete an evaluation project for their internship site. Scholars are required to complete group and individual deliverables to strengthen their skill sets during the program year.
Hot Tip: GEDI scholars reflect a variety of research fields. We host scholars from social work, education, computer science, psychology, education, and public health majors among others. Evaluative thinking and evaluation skills are widely practical. We invite graduate students (masters and doctoral levels) who are interested in exploring and practicing cultural competence in evaluation, are from historically under-represented communities, and are at an institution where evaluation coursework is limited or absent to apply. The call for applications is distributed each spring. Please share this opportunity widely.
Hot Tip: The program is fueled by partnerships with foundations and agencies that can provide evaluation opportunities for our scholars. These internship sites provide our scholars practical professional experience and space in which to apply their program learning. We enthusiastically welcome applications from organizations with space for scholars. Previous host sites have had missions centered on education, health, policy, environment, volunteerism and social services. If you are interested in working with the program and helping shape the next generation of evaluators, please contact us at gedi@eval.org, or watch for the Call for Applications that we distribute in early spring (prior to our call for scholar applications).
Rad Resources: Claremont Evaluation Center’s Professional Development Workshop Series www.cgu.edu/workshops
Center for Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment (CREA) conference http://education.illinois.edu/crea/conference
The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Graduate Education Diversity Internship (GEDI) Program week. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from AEA’s GEDI Program and its interns. For more information on GEDI, see their webpage here: http://www.eval.org/GEDI Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.