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Cases Integrating Ethnography and Evaluation examines the connections between ethnography and evaluation in educational spaces, wrestling with pressing justice and equity issues in today’s societies across the world. The book provides readers from different disciplines and practice areas with detailed accounts of evaluation and ethnographic practice. Contributing chapters employ contemporary ethnographic strategies for engaging people, collecting data, generating knowledge, and taking action to make a social impact.
Concentrating on underrepresented and historically marginalized communities, authors describe evaluations that emphasize the use of fieldwork, participant observation, arts-based strategies, and Indigenous methods to explore the cultural and contextual specificity of educational spaces. Such evaluations pursue greater democracy and justice in educational policy, programs, and systems through forging trusting and reciprocal relationships with individuals and communities.
The chapters situate inquiry in the contested histories and policies of contexts—as they are globally, nationally, and locally defined. Authors present productive fusions of interpretivist and transformative epistemologies, emphasizing both emic understandings and critical framings of social issues. Describing the pursuit of transformative work in collaboration with a diversity of people, these chapters ultimately investigate issues of equity, marginalization, self-determination, (mis)representation, and cultural sustainability in inquiry as well as in education.
The field of evaluation needs more empirical examples that illustrate how to conduct transformative work. This text delivers just that! It offers rich case studies that highlight how ethnographic methods can illuminate both individual and collective experiences, as well as the complex social systems and cultural contexts that shape them. The concrete examples of community engagement, participatory approaches, and the interplay of power and privilege make this book an invaluable resource for advancing more authentic, equitable, and transformative evaluation practice.
Melissa Rae Goodnight is an Assistant Professor in Educational Psychology and Global Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Rodney Hopson serves as Interim Dean and Professor in the School of Education at American University.
Chapter 1. Doing Ethnography and Evaluation: Cases Illustrating Transformative, Intersectional, and Comparative Work; Melissa Rae Goodnight
Section 1. The United States of America
Chapter 2. Beyond the Numbers: Using Critical Collaborative Ethnography to Evaluate Homeplace at a Freedom School; Chonika Coleman-King, Taryrn T.C. Brown, Jalea Turner, Deandra West, Amy Christensen-McLean, and Michael A. Scofield
Chapter 3. Ethnography and Program Evaluation in Early Education: Opportunities for Holistic Understandings of Learning and Development in Context of Beneficiaries’ Lived Experiences; Melissa Miller, Caroline Black, Beth Giacalone, and Sara Sprague
Chapter 4. From the Root: Power, Equity, and the Transition from Graduate Student to Novice Practitioner; Hannah Valdiviejas, Cecilia Vaughn-Guy, Paapa Nkrumah-Ababio, Shiyu Sun, Jailene Aguirre, and Cherie M. Avent
Section 2. Canada
Chapter 5. The Art of Evaluation: Reimagining an Employment Program for Migrant Women Using an Arts-based Approach; Tanis Sawkins
Chapter 6. Using Indigenous Methodologies to Evaluate School Community Councils in Saskatchewan; Ted Amendt
Section 3. Mexico and India
Chapter 7. Social Justice, Inequity, and Coloniality: Emerging Critical Issues in the Evaluation of a Program for Training Young Researchers in the Mayan Area of Mexico; Roger J. González González and Edith J. Cisneros-Cohernour
Chapter 8. Self-work and Apprenticeship: Reflections on an Ethnography of Monitoring and Evaluation in Rural India; Melissa Rae Goodnight
Epilogue; Rodney Hopson