MIE TIG Week: Stafford Hood and Rodney Hopson on Continuing the Journey on Culture and Cultural Context in Evaluation

Greetings AEA and evaluation family, we’re Stafford Hood, professor, University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign and Director, Center for Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment (CREA) and Rodney Hopson, professor, George Mason University and Senior Research Fellow, Center for Education Policy and Evaluation.

We are members of the AEA Multi-Ethnic Issue TIG, having been long time members and having seen the TIG grow over twenty (20) years.  Additionally, we promote the historical and contemporary development of Culturally Responsive Evaluation (CRE).  Grounded in traditions of Robert Stake’s Responsive Evaluation in the 1970s and influenced by the work of Gloria Ladson-Billings, Jackie Jordan Irvine, and Carol Lee who coined Culturally Responsive Pedagogy twenty years later. CRE marries these perspectives into a holistic evaluation framework that centers culture throughout evaluation.  Of particular attention to groups historically marginalized, CRE seeks to balance their interests and matters of equity into the evaluation process.

Hot Tip:  Refer to CRE framework in the 2010 NSF User-Friendly Guide (especially the chapter by Henry Frierson, Stafford Hood, Gerunda Hughes and Veronica Thomas) and the previous Hot Tip to illustrate how CRE can be applied to evaluation practices. 

Lesson Learned: There is a recognizable growth in what some may now call our culturally responsive evaluation community, particularly in the presence of a younger and more diverse cadre of evaluators. A recent search of scholar.google.com of the terms culturally responsive evaluation (CRE) and culturally competent evaluation (CCE) anywhere in an article or chapter or title between 1990 and 2013 indicates the major increase in this discourse over a little more than a decade is illustrated in the table below:

Hopson

Rad Resources:

  • CREA is an international and interdisciplinary evaluation center that is grounded in the need for designing and conducting evaluations and assessments that embody cognitive, cultural, and interdisciplinary diversity that are actively responsive to culturally diverse communities and their academic performance goals;
  • CREA’s second conference is upcoming!: “Forging Alliances For Action:  Culturally Responsive Evaluation Across Fields of Practice” will be held September 18-20, 2014 at the Oak Brook Hills Resort, Chicago – Oak Brook, IL and feature seasoned and emerging scholars and practitioners in the field;
  • AEA Statement on Cultural Competence in Evaluation is the (2011) membership-approved document as the result of the Building Diversity Initiative (co-sponsored by AEA and W.K.Kellogg Foundation in 1999);
  • Indigenous Framework for Evaluation, which synthesizes Indigenous ways of knowing and Western evaluation practice, is summarized in a Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation 2010 paper by Joan LaFrance and Richard Nichols.

The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Multiethnic Issues in Evaluation (MIE) Week with our colleagues in the MIE Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from MIE TIG members. 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.

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