language

A Look at Language Week: It’s Time to Move Away From Opaque Evaluation Concepts by Melissa Chapman Haynes

I’m Melissa Chapman Haynes, Director of Evaluation at Professional Data Analysts and adjunct at the University of Minnesota. Each spring I teach an Evaluation Internship course to graduate students from various sectors. And each spring this is the one time that I utter a couple of words that make me cringe. I use these words …

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A Look at Language Week: Renaming Social Betterment by Jean King

Greetings. This is Jean King, an Evaluation Studies professor at the University of Minnesota for another three months. My life-long goal as an evaluator has been to leave this messy world of ours a better place as a result of my work, even knowing that the measurement of that outcome is highly challenging. Some call …

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A Look at Language Week: Beyond Competency by Michael Quinn Patton

I am Michael Quinn Patton of Utilization-Focused Evaluation. Engaging intended users I have to be thoughtful about words, attempting to avoid jargon and words that make people cringe. What those words are can change –and surprise.  Take, for instance, the notion of competency. The profession of evaluation is fairly obsessed with competency: a major factor …

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A Look at Language Week: (On The Absence of) Whiteness by A. Rafael Johnson

I’m A. Rafael Johnson, an arts-based evaluator at TerraLuna Collaborative in Minneapolis. I use the methodologies of the arts to gather, analyze, and report data for communities, arts organizations, and non-arts organizations. But I’m a writer and novelist before I’m an evaluator. Words matter to me. For me, words carry meaning. In fact, words are …

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A Look at Language Week: Tidying Evaluation of “Diversity” & “Culture” by Vidhya Shanker

Vidhya Shanker from Rainbow Research here. Inspired by Marie Kondo, who advises keeping only what touches our hearts, I offer evaluation two words to discard. Diversity: Descended from business, “diversity” was introduced in evaluation in the late 1980s by AEA president Ross Conner. Conner explicitly expressed concern regarding the representation of women—where he felt AEA …

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A Look at Language Week: Words That Make Me Cringe by Nora Murphy Johnson

Hi! My name is Nora Murphy Johnson, a Creative Evaluator and co-founder of TerraLuna Collaborative and the Developmental Evaluation Institute. Our blog posts this week are written by Minnesota evaluators working in justice and equity spaces, focus on words–words to retire, discard, or include. I am writing about words that make me cringe because the …

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How mindful language helps us challenge power imbalances by Liz Zadnik

Happy Saturday all!  Liz Zadnik here, aea365 Outreach Coordinator and sometime Saturday contributor.  Summer has arrived on the East Coast of the United States.  For me, summer has always encouraged me to check in with myself and take some time to reorganize and recalibrate.  Like time slows down a little and I have few more …

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AHE TIG Week: Mwarumba Mwavita, Katye Perry, and Sarah Wilkey on How Do You Conduct an Evaluation in a Fluid, Ever Changing Ecology Like Higher Education?

Our names are Mwarumba Mwavita, Katye Perry, and Sarah Wilkey. We are faculty and evaluators in the Center for Educational Research and Evaluation at Oklahoma State University. Higher education has constantly been engaged in the development, revamping, and implementation of programs. Often these changes result in reorganizations of existing programs and contribute to a dynamic …

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