Demystifying Validity: A Dynamic Tool for Evaluation Practice
Facilitator(s): Karen E. Kirkhart, Ayesha S. Boyce, & Jori N. Hall
Time: 9:00am - 5:00pm (Full Day)
Description: Think validity is an arcane concept from your Introduction to Measurement course? Or a narrow post-positivist construction that reifies privilege? Think again! Validity anchors trustworthy understandings and actions. Validity empowers culturally responsive evaluation and assessment, challenging us to do our best work. Validity connects theory, method, relationship, experience, and consequences. Validity demands critical reflection, dialogue, and debate. Validity is complex, unfinished, and never boring. Please join us in a lively conversation, sharing ideas, resources, and experiences!! CREA seeks to produce valid understandings and actions that advance justice. Yet, the concept of validity is complex. With a commitment to equity and an intersectional understanding of oppression, CREA demands evaluation practices that can mitigate historically negative impacts of evaluation and assessment on minoritized and Indigenous communities. This perspective invites us to rethink validity: Should it be rejected as a tool of colonial supremacy or redefined to reinforce CREA’s authenticity? How might justifications for and threats to validity be considered to align with CREA principles? What has CREA taught us about validity to serve justice in evaluation?
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Relational Responsibility in Native Hawaiian Contexts: A Culturally Responsive Evaluation Approach
Facilitator(s): Pālama Lee
Time: 8:00am - 12:00pm (Half Day AM)
Description: This workshop provides a collaborative space to explore relational responsibility in culturally responsive evaluation (CRE) within Native Hawaiian contexts. In the CREA-Hawaiʻi community, we often proudly refer to ourselves as activist researchers and evaluators. We use these tools with discipline and rigor to advance Native Hawaiian wellbeing. Drawing from Native Hawaiian frameworks of the Lōkahi Triangle, Kūkulu Kumuhana, Evaluation with Aloha, Mauliola, and Nā Hopena A‘o (HĀ), this workshop will emphasize values of pilina (interconnectedness), manawaleʻa (to give without expectation of reciprocity), and kuleana (responsibility). Participants will be invited to reflect on their personal commitments to relational responsibility and consider how these can inform culturally responsive and sustaining evaluation praxis.
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Fostering Cultural Competency and LGBTQ+ Diversity in Evaluation Practice
Facilitator(s): Erik Elías Glenn, Esrea Perez-Bill, and Gregory Phillips II
Time: 8:00am - 12:00pm (Half Day AM)
Description: This session will equip evaluators with the tools to enhance inclusivity and cultural competence when working with LGBTQ+ communities. Participants will learn foundational terminology related to sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity (SSOGI), best practices for collecting SSOGI data, and strategies for culturally responsive evaluation. Through interactive discussions and exercises, attendees will explore how to integrate LGBTQ+ considerations into their work, ensuring evaluations are equitable and relevant to LGBTQ+ communities.
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Collaboration Bootcamp! Developing the Qualities Needed for Social Transformation
Facilitator(s): Geri Peak & Susan Wolfe
Time: 8:00am - 12:00pm (Half Day AM)
Description: What if we told you the most important aspect of collaboration is learning to interact in harmony with others and that contentious debate, rather than inspirers of innovation lead to innovation “in spite of” our cortisol response? Inspired by the axiom “transforming selves and systems”, participants of all levels and interests will explore the practice of refining themselves into trustworthy collaborators. Participants will receive and contribute to a guidebook, practice new or refined skills, gain access to free-to-use exercises, tools, and methods all while building their capacity, understanding and abilities to hone their relational responsibilities, whether as participants or guides. Collaboration Bootcamp! strengthens what CREA 8 calls relational responsibilities: the qualities that help “actionists” hone their personal behaviors and practices towards excellent culturally responsive, equitable and liberatory collaborative practices. Inspired by the axiom “transforming selves and systems”, This workshop provides the space for participants of all levels and interests to explore the practice of refining themselves into trustworthy collaborators.
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LGBTQ+ Evaluation Framework: Theory and Practice for Queer Liberation
Facilitator(s): Erik Elías Glenn, Esrea Perez-Bill, and Gregory Phillips II
Time: 1:00pm - 5:00pm (Half Day PM)
Description: LGBTQ+ Evaluation is a comprehensive framework that provides a robust approach to assessing programs, projects, and policies impacting LGBTQ+ populations. It emphasizes the importance of contextual understanding and a strengths-based approach, recognizing that LGBTQ+ populations bring valuable histories of resilience, advocacy, and community solidarity that can maximize processes and outcomes. This dynamic and interactive workshop will provide attendees with an intensive, practice-based experience that will connect the foundational principles of LGBTQ+ evaluation from theory, into practice. Attendees will leave the session with the necessary tools to advance their culturally responsive evaluation with LGBTQ+ communities.
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Centering Latine Community Voices through Culturally Responsive and Responsible Evaluation
Facilitator(s): Lisa Aponte-Soto
Time: 1:00pm - 5:00pm (Half Day PM)
Description: Enacting culturally responsive and responsible evaluation (CRE) frameworks with diverse Latine and BIPOC communities calls for evaluators to honor culture and context by centering community voices using liberatory and participatory practices. This workshop is structured in three main components. Part I will provide an overview of social justice evaluation theories and foundational principles of CRE with an emphasis on LatCrit and contemporary indigenous praxis-oriented paradigms for working with Latine and BIPOC communities. Part II will focus on self-reflection exercises to assess the evaluators’ positionality as CRE agents. Part III will guide participants through applied case study exercises in small groups.
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Using Quantitative Data to Address Civil Rights in Education
Facilitator(s): Toks Fashola
Time: 1:00pm - 5:00pm (Half Day PM)
Description: As we explore the experiences of minorities and indigenous children in public school systems (especially in the U.S), we are constantly informed about the underperformance of minority and indigenous populations in the public school settings. These populations tend to be overrepresented in the areas of discipline, expulsion, bullying, and other negative experiences, yet they are underrepresented in the areas of gifted and talented education, Advanced Placement classes, college readiness, and other positive experiences. The goal of this workshop is twofold. The first goal of this workshop is to address the topic of healing by exploring the CRDC, and address policy issues that are either helping or hurting the targeted students. Participants will be introduced to the dataset, and will be invited to select areas or topics that they are interested in, and explore how the data explore these topics. For instance, the database can show the existence of suspensions and expulsions across the country, and explore schools or districts where these suspensions and expulsions occur the most, but also explore these by race and gender.
AI in Culturally Responsive Evaluation: From Principles to Practice
Facilitator(s): Zach Tilton & Linda Raftree
Time: 8:00am - 12:00pm (Half Day)
Description: As artificial intelligence tools become increasingly prevalent in evaluation practice, ensuring their alignment with culturally responsive evaluation principles is critical. This interactive workshop guides participants through examining AI frameworks through a CRE lens, ultimately developing three practical resources: an AI-CREA Manifesto, an AI Tool Assessment Rubric, and an AI-Enabled Evaluation Checklist. Using participatory methods including gallery walks, small group analysis, and collaborative tool development, participants will contribute to field-advancing frameworks while building practical skills for assessing and implementing AI tools that maintain cultural integrity.
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Holler If Ya' Hear Me: Culturally Responsive Racially Equitable Evaluation as a Tool for Disrupting the Nonprofit Industrial Complex, Racial Healing, and Building Community Power
Facilitator(s): Tracy Hilliard
Time: 8:00am - 12:00pm (Half Day)
Description: This workshop will equip individuals, organizations, and communities with culturally responsive, racially equitable evaluation (CRREE) strategies that: resist transactional, top-down approaches, foster racial healing and community building, and build power. Workshop participants will critically examine how traditional evaluation practices can reinforce racism and maintain power dynamics including the Nonprofit Industrial Complex (NPIC) and other inequitable structures. CRREE methodologies will be shared for building power in grassroots organizations, nonprofits, and communities. Workshop facilitators will provide practical tools for facilitating racial healing dialogues, co-creating learning and evaluation frameworks, prioritizing and amplifying community voices, and leveraging data to build collective power and agency.