Rodney Hopson on Culturally Responsive Evaluation

My name is Rodney Hopson. I am a faculty member in the Department of Educational Foundations and Leadership in the School of Education at Duquesne University. For the last several years (with a host of great colleagues in AEA, with Torres Consulting Group and OMG Center for Collaborative Learning with the support of the National Science Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, I have been developing internship and fellowship programs to support graduate and post-graduate students of color and from traditionally underrepresented communities. Embedded in their practice is the understanding and development of Culturally Responsive Evaluation (CRE) approaches and practices in these same communities.

Rad Resource: Adapting the elements of evaluation practice into one that reflects a culturally responsive one, Karen Kirkhart, social work professor at Syracuse University, and I have presented at the AEA/CDC Summer Institute for the last few years. We use the Frierson, Hood, & Hughes chapter in the 2002 National Science Foundation User-Friendly Handbook for Project Evaluation to guide a deeper understanding of how to integrate CRE throughout the evaluation.

Hot Tip: Situate CRE within elements or a framework of evaluation. Whether you use the CDC Evaluation Steps, or another framework to describe steps in evaluation, the key is to embed CRE throughout. For instance, at each stage of evaluation, CRE should be present from the time we prepare for the evaluation to the dissemination and use of results. Below is the CRE framework (with appreciation for the support of Elizabeth Kahl, Syracuse University, who assisted us on graphic and technical design elements), adapted from Frierson, et.al, 2002:

Rad Resource: Learn more about fellowship and internship programs in culturally responsive evaluation through the RWJF Evaluation Fellowship website or AEA’s Graduate Education Diversity Internship website.

Rad Resource: Develop a better theoretical and practical explanation of CRE by reading about its origins, its aim, and its movement as reflected in chapters in any of the following books and special issues:

• The Role of Culture and Cultural Context in Evaluation (Hood, Hopson, and Frierson Eds., Information Age Publishing)
• The SAGE International Handbook of Educational Evaluation (Ryan and Cousins, Eds, SAGE.)
• Handbook of Social Research Ethics (Mertens and Ginsberg, Eds., SAGE)
• SAGE Handbook of Evaluation (Shaw, Greene, and Mark, Eds., SAGE.)
• The Handbook of Leadership Development Evaluation (Hannum, Martineau and Reinelt, Eds., Jossey-Bass)
• In Search of Cultural Competence in Evaluation (Thompson-Robinson, Hopson, Sen Gupta, Eds, Jossey-Bass)
• Responsive Evaluation (Greene and Abma, Eds., Jossey-Bass)

Want to hear more from Rodney Hopson? He is serving as this week’s Thought Leader on the AEA Thought Leader Discussion Series. Learn more at http://www.eval.org/thought_leaders.asp. This contribution is from the aea365 Daily Tips blog, by and for evaluators, from the American Evaluation Association. Please consider contributing – send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org.