Power, Privilege, and Competence: Using the 2018 AEA Evaluator Competencies to Shape Socially Just Evaluation Practice

Abstract

Twenty-first century evaluators face an imperative to recognize their privileged role in navigating socially complex terrain in ways that are ethical, demonstrate sensitivity to local and global social inequities, and reflect awareness of contested views of reality. Social justice and equity are increasingly viewed as a foundation of practice, necessitating that evaluators learn how to address potential power imbalances occurring within evaluations, the larger contexts in which those evaluations occur, and the emerging profession itself. This chapter addresses how the 2018 American Evaluation Association (AEA) Evaluator Competencies may help evaluators direct explicit attention to issues of power, privilege, and equity. We discuss how these competencies can aid evaluators in honing their practice to support evaluation' s role in attaining social justice. We also spotlight some programmatic exemplars that offer insights and resources for this work.

Enhancing the inclusion of gender and sexually diverse populations in evaluation: Reflections grounded in practice

“…Evaluators often work from a place of privilege (Hall, 2020) and are outsiders and not members of the community for whom the programme they are evaluating is designed to serve (Symonette et al, 2020;Wright & LaVelle, 2020). It is incumbent on evaluators to ensure they have sufficient competency and skills to be involved in a particular evaluation.…”

Introduction: Special Issue on Assessment as Pedagogy in Education Abroad

“…The field of assessment, growing from similar institutional contexts, has often shared or even reified those norms. Today, particularly, beyond the education abroad professional enclave, assessment work is increasingly shaped by other paradigms: student-centered methodologies (Harper & Kuh, 2007;Lapp, Fisher, & Frey, 2013), critical theory and pedagogy (Heiser, Prince & Levy, 2018), data feminism (D'Ignazio & Klein, 2020) and assessment as and for social justice (Lundquist & Henning, 2020;Symonette, Miller & Barela, 2020). In this final section of the special issue, we therefore feature articles meant to encourage international educators to challenge possible institutional biases about data collection, instruments, or methodologies and data analysis for assessment (as well as for research and program evaluation) and to consider a broader range of methodologies.…”

Planting the Seeds for High-Quality Program Evaluation in Public Health

“…(p. 283) Culturally responsive evaluation is recognized as starting toward the end of the 1990s (though instances of evaluations using principles that are part of this approach occurred as early as the 1930s), and stemmed from work conducted in education, which focused on cultural responsiveness in assessment and pedagogy (Hood, Hopson, & Kirkhart, 2015). More recently, explicit attention has been given to the role of evaluation in promoting social justice in society (Mertens & Wilson, 2019;Neubauer et al, 2020;Symonette, Miller, & Barela, 2020). Several evaluation approaches, including Deliberative Democratic Evaluation (House & Howe, 2004), Transformative Participatory Evaluation (Mertens & Wilson, 2019), and Values-Engaged Educative Evaluation (Greene et al, 2011) explicitly seek to promote social justice and human rights through conducting evaluation in a manner that is attuned and responsive to power differentials and systemic inequities (Mertens & Wilson, 2019).…”