Hello, AEA365 community, and happy Conference Week from Portland! The AEA staff have been working overtime to prepare for our biggest event of the year. Whether you will be joining us for the conference or not, you can keep up with our happenings via the AEA365 blog. See you around!
-Liz DiLuzio, Lead Curator
Greetings! We are Rugi Kane and Susan Igras, evaluators working across cultures and countries and recent facilitators of the AEA Professional Development Workshop in Portland, “Let’s Slay those adolescent and youth-focused program evaluations! Crucial concepts in planning evaluations and integrating meaningful youth engagement approaches and methods.”
Have you heard people say: “Young people are not serious! They don’t know how to think critically! They [you can fill in this blank ]!” How can we challenge ourselves to move away from such (often conscious) thinking and be more in tune with how adolescents and youth think, feel, and analyze their situations, and thus alter evaluation planning and practice? We focus this blog on the adult evaluator mindset, which can inhibit or enhance meaningful youth engagement in evaluation.
Cool tips for getting evaluators into the youth space:
- Invite several program beneficiaries to do a meet-and-greet with the evaluation team. You might use an informal and fun talk show format to facilitate youth sharing, followed by an audience Q&A.
- Use ‘Remembering when’ exercises. Ask evaluators to journal about what it was like to be 13, 17, and 20. What were the big concerns and joys, or the state of relationships with family, friends, and teachers? Such reflections provide a forum to discuss the realities of young people across ages and stages of development and lived experience.
- Short videos can launch discussions on the power and position of young people vis-à-vis adults. See UNICEF-Africa’s short, animated video, Including Children’s Voices in the Evaluation Process.
Rad Resources:
- We have assessed team readiness to engage young people meaningfully with the Youth-Adult Partnership Rubric: A tool for professional development and program evaluation in youth settings. Developed by Michigan State University and Neutral Zone, the rubric examines four critical dimensions of Youth-Adult Partnership: (1) authentic decision-making, (2) natural mentors, (3) reciprocity, and (4) community connectedness.
- Get inspired to try an intergenerational approach that involves young people throughout the evaluation process. Watch this UNFPA video-reflection of benefits and surprises by younger and older members of a multi-country evaluation team, Meaningful youth engagement in evaluation: Multiplying the transformative power of evaluation.
- For a broader view of meaningful youth engagement, see Involving Children in Evaluation: What Should You Know, a 2023 Practice Guide by the Australian Institute of Family Studies. It offers a comprehensive overview with linked resources on critical issues including addressing power imbalances, ensuring ethical approaches, using youth-friendly data collection methods, and sharing findings with young people.
Even though it might seem like too much effort, or you don’t know how to begin, moving from an adult-centric to a more power-balanced endeavor where youth opinions and analyses matter asmuch as adults is a win-win situation. Evaluators not only gain a more profound understanding of issues and context, but such experiences may transform their practice.
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