Arts-based approaches provide a means of reclaiming visual and kinesthetic aspects of inquiry to engage in culturally sensitive research with underrepresented communities (Goopy & Kassan, 2019). In this chapter, the author focuses on using artmaking to stimulate questioning and reflection and to spark dialogue and deliberation in community with others as part of a program evaluation. As a practitioner-researcher, the author inquires into one of the programs that the author managed at a community college-an employment training program for migrant women seeking employment in the hospitality sector. The program sought to provide holistic supports to help migrant women overcome barriers. Grounded in ethnographic principles, this research situated program evaluation within the lived experiences of participants, centering their voices and contexts as integral to understanding program outcomes. The range of research methods the author used-collage-making (Butler-Kisber, 2008), gallery walk (Pink, 2008), and direct observation with field notes-reflects ethnography's commitment to immersing in participants' environments and narratives. These methods, associated with qualitative approaches to inquiry (Patton, 2015) and specifically practitioner inquiry, reveal how identity, social capital, and investment intersect for program participants learning English language, literacy, and employment readiness skills. Researching and evaluating a program that the author works in affords both opportunities and limitations. In summary, drawing on ethnographic methods within arts-informed program evaluation and inquiring into the author's own practice through a social equity lens compels the author as a practitioner-researcher. This chapter illuminates adult education's transformative possibilities for contributing to, creating, and sustaining a socioeconomically integrated, healthy, diverse, and inclusive society.
The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) publicly reports on the quality of India's rural primary education system and its children's basic learning levels across all states; ASER is produced via a groundbreaking model for citizen-engaged monitoring and evaluation (M&E). This chapter describes the author's ethnography of the ASER M&E effort via field observation, interviews, and document data, which the author collected in several Indian states as a doctoral candidate. For researchers of educational M&E efforts, observing these data being collected in the field can unveil unique discoveries as these methods well position researchers to distinctively investigate the cultural and contextual issues that influence M&E. Thorough analysis of culture and context has long been associated with the strengths of ethnographic work in education and governance. In keeping with the focus of this edited volume, the author presents her development of her ASER study and explains key issues that arose during her ethnographic work: her positionality, research preparation, cultural competence, self-work, apprenticeship, and fieldwork dilemmas. In this chapter, the author aims to illuminate how the researcher-as the main instrument in ethnographic work-must routinely assess themselves, carefully prepare for cross-cultural work, and continuously reckon with their limitations and emerging fieldwork dilemmas. She also describes how consistent self-work and fieldwork apprenticeships facilitate the researcher's bicultural understanding of the phenomenon under study. This chapter is a reflection afforded by time-the insights gleaned from a decade of thinking about the meaning and experience of fieldwork.
This chapter describes scholarship integrating ethnography and evaluation to transform educational inquiry and educational entities (programs, systems, and policies). The central question explored is, how do we best pursue work connecting evaluation and ethnography to fulfill our commitments to diversity, justice, and cultural responsiveness in educational spaces to make tangible transformative change? With 40 years of literature on ethnography-evaluation connections as a foundation, this chapter describes three coalescing themes: transformative, intersectional, and comparative. These themes are proposed as valuable for guiding contemporary educational inquiry that serves social justice. The transformative theme denotes educational inquiry in which the researcher or evaluator ethically collects data, makes defensible interpretations, and facilitates social change in collaboration with others. Doing transformative work that meaningfully fuses ethnography and evaluation rests on essential factors like time, values engagement, collaboration, and self-work. The intersectional theme describes intersectionality as an evolving analytical framework that promotes social problem-solving and learning via investigating the significance of intersecting social identities in (a) how people's lives are shaped, (b) their access to power across circumstances, and (c) their everyday experiences of subordination and discrimination. Finally, the comparative theme refers to sensibilities and practices gleaned from the interdisciplinary and transnational field of comparative education, including developing comparative cultural understanding and analyzing complex systems in one's inquiry projects. This chapter concludes with descriptions of the cases comprising this volume, which exemplify these themes and leverage ethnographic concepts and practices in doing transformative evaluation work in educational spaces.
The purpose of this research was to understand the experiences and challenges faced by young people from rural communities in the Mayan region of Mexico who are trained in science and technology, as well as to understand the impact of the national scientific promotion policy, Jovenes Talentos, from the perspective of the involved actors. To achieve this, the authors conducted an evaluative-ethnographic case study in three phases. The authors began with the development of two mini-cases of young people from rural communities in Yucatan who were participating in the program. Subsequently, the authors administered a questionnaire to the participants, and in the third phase, the authors conducted focus groups with participants from rural communities. The results were grouped into five categories, revealing serious deficiencies in the education provided in the rural Mayan context. Poverty was found to influence the educational trajectory of young Mayans and their participation in the program. Additionally, these young people face coloniality and modernity in the educational system, leading to discrimination, school segregation, and gender stereotypes in the educational, scientific, and technological sectors. From a critical perspective, concepts of social justice, coloniality, and modernity are addressed, questioning the dominant approaches in science and technology that impose decontextualized and Eurocentric educational models. This analysis seeks to promote transformative change toward an inclusive educational model that recognizes the cultural and epistemic specificities of Indigenous peoples, in favor of a socially just and liberating education for the Maya communities of Mexico.
An equity- and justice-centered evaluation method course can be a catalyst for connecting evaluation theory to practice and foster the cultural competence required in culturally responsive evaluation (Hood et al., 2005). This chapter offers students' perspectives on taking an applied evaluation course that cultivated the tools needed to navigate the sociopolitical and ethical complexities intrinsic to evaluation (Hall et al., 2023). The authors highlight insights around developing the authors' identities as (novice) evaluators, which could inform the creation and refinement of future evaluation courses. The authors introduce collaborative autoethnography as an analysis tool for understanding how an evaluation course can connect theory, practice, and engagement with identity while offering the space for social commentary (Holt, 2003). Collaborative autoethnography allows researchers to turn their collective observations and experiences into rich qualitative data (Roy & Uekusa, 2020). In this work, the authors ask: (1) how do graduate students navigate bridging theories of social justice and critical evaluation with praxis based on their intersectional identities? and (2) what classroom dynamics empower novice practitioners to prioritize social inequities and power dynamics within evaluation? The authors' perspectives were informed by three community evaluation projects undertaken in the course, all dealing with issues of marginalization (Madison, 1992), grounded in a transformational worldview that espouses values of social justice and empowerment (Mertens & Wilson, 2018). Using thematic analysis of the authors' assignments and retrospective focus group discussions, the authors share the authors' journey through understanding the awkward process of transitioning from student to practitioner and emphasizing how positionality links to epistemologies, ontologies, and methodologies (Greene, 2006).
