The Seventh International CREA Conference is pleased to provide the following full-day and half-day workshops for your continued professional development:
Note: If you sign up for a full-day workshop, you will not be able to attend other Tuesday workshops.
(This is a full-day workshop. If you sign up for this workshop, you will not be able to attend other Tuesday workshops)
Facilitators: Karen E. Kirkhart, Syracuse University; Rodney Hopson, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Date: Tuesday, October 3, 2023
Time: 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
This workshop comes on the 10th anniversary of CREA I, which included a keynote address, Repositioning Validity (Kirkhart, 2013). We celebrate a decade of reflection on validity in the context of Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment (CREA), showing how both validity theory and evaluation theory can be extended in the service of equity, inclusion, and justice.
Building upon an intersectional understanding of inequity and oppression, CREA directs evaluators’ attention to practice procedures that can mitigate historically negative impacts of evaluation and assessment on minoritized and Indigenous communities. But how does this call us to reconsider validity? Should it be rejected as a tool of colonial supremacy? Should it be embraced to support the authenticity of CREA? How might validity be repurposed and redefined to improve congruence with the principles underlying CREA? What has CREA taught us about validity?
This workshop moves participants from theory to application, while updating validity conversations over the past decade. Following opening introductions and acknowledgements, we review foundational definitions of culture, intersectionality, and validity, highlighting complexities. A brief history of two justice-seeking frameworks—multicultural validity and culturally responsive evaluation—examines how they both support and challenge one another. Moving from theory to application, participants will apply the elements of a Culture Checklist (updated from Kirkhart, 2013a-b) to their own contexts of practice, which in turn may raise additional considerations.
(This is a full-day workshop. If you sign up for this workshop, you will not be able to attend other Tuesday workshops)
Facilitators: Tracy Hilliard, Michigan Public Health Institute; Ebony Reddock, Michigan Public Health Institute; Mindelyn Anderson, Mirror Group
Date: Tuesday, October 3, 2023
Time: 9 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
The field of evaluation is being challenged to utilize a process that considers who is being evaluated and who is conducting the evaluation. MPHI has worked to develop useful frameworks, tools, and approaches that evaluators could consider focusing on the ways that race and culture might influence an evaluation process; this has resulted in the development of a framework for conducting evaluation using a culturally responsive and racial equity lens. This workshop focuses on the practical use of a racial equity lens when conducting evaluation. The framework argues that culture and race are important considerations when conducting an evaluation because we believe that there are both critical and substantive nuances that are often missed, ignored, and/or misinterpreted when an evaluator is not aware of the culture of those being evaluated. Participants will be provided with a Template for Analyzing Programs through a Culturally Responsive and Racial Equity Lens, designed to focus deliberately on an evaluation process that takes race, culture, equity, and community context into consideration. Presenters will also share a “How-to Process” focused on the cultural competencies of individuals conducting evaluations, how such competencies might be improved, and strategies for doing so. This “How-to Process” is the result of thinking around developing a self-assessment instrument for evaluators, is based primarily on the cultural-proficiencies literature, and relates specifically to components of the template. Participants will have the opportunity to engage in small-group exercises to apply the concepts contained in the template to real-world evaluation processes. Based on these experiences, participants will gain practical knowledge on the use of the lens.
Note: Full-day and half-day workshops run concurrently on Tuesday, October 3, 2023. If you register for our full-day workshops you will not be able to attend any of our Tuesday half-day workshops.
(This is a half-day workshop; please note this is a morning session.)
Facilitators: Bill Esrea Perez, Northwestern University; Gregory Phillips, Northwestern University; Erik Elias Glenn, Northwestern University
Date: Tuesday, October 3, 2023
Time: 8:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Principles of justice, equity, and cultural responsiveness are foundational to the field of evaluation’s important work. These principles guide us in centering marginalized voices, experiences, and individuals in our practice in order to ensure that as evaluators, we are not just observers - but actors, supporters, and co-conspirators alongside the communities that we work with. Despite calls to center communities at the margins in our work, the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and other sexual and gender minority (LGBTQ+) community has been largely excluded from evaluation theory, models, and frameworks. LGBTQ+ Evaluation utilizes evaluation as a tool to move us towards a thriving present and future that is guided by a deep love for the stories, livelihoods, and liberation of LGBTQ+ people and communities. 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 be culturally responsive LGBTQ+ evaluators, advocates, and allies.
(This is a half-day workshop; please note this is a morning session.)
Facilitator(s): Geri Peak, Two Gems Consulting Services
Date: Tuesday, October 3, 2023
Time: 8:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Building upon the restorative and healing approach to evaluation practiced for the past 25 years and inspired by the luminous work of Sistah Dr. Hazel Symonette, this workshop provides an opportunity for participants to work as collaborators who are dedicated to the principle of a twofold advancement where it is essential to transform and hone ourselves as “responsive instruments” in order to have any effective impact on social transformation through our chosen service/art of evaluation and assessment.
In the first hour: Participants will co-create a brave working space through shared agreements to explore how our environments, our methods and mechanisms, our training and our sources of support introduce practices and patterns of thought which perpetuate harm in communities facing systemic oppression with an emphasis on those who are racialized and minoritized. Starting with a brief overview of how racialized ideas have influenced westernized approaches to research and evaluation, the rest of the workshop will use interactive adult learning approaches, arts integration, story share and consultation to allow each member to map a real harm through their practice. For example, the practice of “racing” individuals through using race as an explanatory variable absent theoretical evidence for its use reinforces othering and false attribution that has led to persistent harms in both medical and public health practice.
During the next two hours: We will use story and journey mapping to identify places along the life course where harmful norms first entered into our awareness (in retrospect), individual journaling to anchor our personal stories and artistic expression (movement, sketching, guided poetry construction) to share our experiences and take individual time to create a restorative plan for ongoing transformative reflection and growth.
Finally, we will use the last hour to gather into affinity groups during our last hour together to explore pathways towards healing our arenas of influence. These will be guided by the group, but may well fall into field categories such as community coalitions, academia, philanthropy, public institutions, non-profit organization, and independent and corporate consulting.
Examples shared along the way will resources in the form of transformative frameworks for social transformation, particularly exploring those centering blackness as a reparative to white dominance and not as an exclusionary or divisive ideology and spiritually principled frameworks for social action that center collective advancement over exploitative approaches to experimentation.
The workshop will model a healthy mind/body/spirit balance by matching intellectual reflection and knowledge acquisition/exploration with what the body is sensing and what the heart is feeling.
(This is a half-day workshop; please note this is an afternoon session.)
Facilitator(s): Lisa Aponte-Soto, Tanoma Consulting
Date: Tuesday, October 3, 2023
Time: 1:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
The Latine (Lee, 2020) community in the U.S. currently accounts for nearly 19% of the total population and is projected to comprise about one-third of Americans by 2050 (U.S. Census, 2021). Latines encompass a variety of cultural groups, sociopolitical identities, ethnicities, and national origins (Rumbaut and Portes, 2001). Acknowledging the growing Latine community in the U.S., it is critical to understand the complexity and diversity of the Latine culture to honor culture and context by centering love, authenticity, and healing practices. This will then provide a foundation for evaluators to use CREE to align the assets and strengths of the community members and their environments with culturally and linguistically appropriate programs and services.
Implementing CREE (Frierson et al., 2010) cannot occur in isolation. It calls for engaging an interdisciplinary community of scholars in discourse around actionable advocacy, democratic principles, courageous leadership, and social justice agency that advance the knowledge of attending to culture and context. According to SenGupta, Hopson, and Thompson-Robison (2004, p.13), CRE(E) “is actively cognizant, understanding and appreciative of the cultural context in which evaluation takes place.” Recognizing the added-value of co-learning with cross-cultural evaluators working for and with Latine-serving programs, this workshop is structured in three main components to allow participants to reflect and apply CREE.
In Part I, participants will reflect on the foundational social justice evaluation theories and principles of CREE with an emphasis on Latino Critical Race Theory (LatCrit) and contemporary indigenous praxis-oriented paradigms for working with Latine communities. This component will discuss the unique cultural values and identity in relevance to Latine culture and inclusive participatory approaches. Part II will guide participants through self-reflection exercises to assess their positionality as evaluators and agents of CREE (Symonette, 2008). Part III will lead participants in small groups discussions through applied case study exercises using CREE. The facilitator will also extract from a series of evaluation projects and case studies with Latine communities to illustrate CREE in practice. In Part III, participants will have an opportunity to reflect and react to real-world case studies of missteps when working with Latine communities. Attendees will identify ways to leverage missteps by promoting a culture learning to embrace health and healing and avoid further demeaning and harming communities.
The facilitator is a Latine evaluator with experience conducting Latine responsive and equitable evaluation (LREE). The facilitator will share unique perspectives and experiences practicing LREE and reflect on where the field has been and what directions it needs to take when practicing evaluation for and with Latine communities. Practical applications explore tactics attending to the unique heterogeneity of Latine culture across multiple contexts, settings, communities, and geographic regions. Participants will have an opportunity reflect on their experiences with Latine-focused evaluation planning and practice.
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1. Latine is a gender-inclusive term that emerged from the Hispanic/Latina/o/x community (Lee, 2020).
(This is a half-day workshop; please note this is an afternoon session.)
Facilitator(s): Toks Fashola, American University
Date: Tuesday, October 3, 2023
Time: 1:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
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 Office of Civil Rights was created in 1966, as a part of the Civil Rights act of 1964, with the goal of providing access to education to everyone. Schools and school districts are required to submit information yearly to the OCR, and the database is available for public use. 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.
The second (or secondary) goal of this workshop is to introduce the participants to quantitative data and data analysis (or data wrangling). The participants will learn to explore the contents of the database, but will also learn some basic concepts of data science and data analysis, such as creating data dictionaries, understanding variables, exploring relationships and data representation.
We will address quantitative topics such as variable types, creating data dictionaries and visualizing and displaying data in various manners. We will also explore the concept of transforming data from excel into a data program such as SPSS or STATA, and learning the basics of how and why to code data.
Workshop Methods: The overall method will be exploratory in nature. The participants will select their area of interest from the database, and then all of the analyses that they participate in will be based upon their areas of interest, based upon the aforementioned topics. The workshop approach will be full participatory and hands-on. Methods will include didactic teaching, cooperative and group learning, and project based learning tasks.
Intended Outcomes for Participants:
1. Become aware of large datasets that are relevant to Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment.
2. Learn to use said large datasets to address culturally responsive policy issues
3. Learn to use said large datasets to address culturally responsive policy issues to address the topic of healing, and paradigms of care in the future
4. Introduction to the concept of quantitative data analysis, data science, and data wrangling, based on topics that are near and dear to their hearts.
5. Be more empowered to analyze data in large datasets using Culturally Responsive approaches
(This is a half-day workshop; please note this is a Wednesday morning session.)
Facilitators: Herb M. Lee, Jr., Pacific American Foundation
Date: Wednesday, October 4, 2023
Time: 8:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
This workshop brings together two emerging and complementary Native Hawaiian frameworks founded on traditional cultural ways of knowing and being, and examples of how they are being used to reshape evaluation practice as a healing practice in Hawaiʻi.
Through hands-on engagement with the frameworks, participants will explore the utility of these frameworks or adaptations of them when working in their own cultural contexts and reflect on their evaluation praxis, exploring ways to use culturally responsive evaluation as healing interventions working with Indigenous groups and/or people of color to counter colonial and racist assumptions and practices.
Although both frameworks are grounded in ancestral knowledge spanning a multitude of generations and centuries (if not millennia), their articulation and publication for the explicit purposes of guiding research and evaluation are quite recent. In 2016, a group of researchers and evaluators came together to answer the question, “What if the practice of evaluation was guided by the value of Aloha?” At its essence the Framework privileges Aloha as the primary evaluation intelligence and competency when working in Hawaiian contexts. The framework offers evaluators ways to think about living in a space of respectful relationships, honoring the histories and stories of injustice and justice (e.g., military occupation and cultural re-birth), and unpacking colonial assumptions that interfere with understanding the truths experienced by the Indigenous communities.
The value and definition of Aloha are informed by Aunty Pilahi Paki, a Native Hawaiian elder and expert in language and sound, and by Puanani Burgess, a poet and staunch community leader. In the foreword to the framework, Puanani describes the complexity of evaluating with Aloha, “I have been struggling with the notion that there is an Aloha Framework that will help to guide us, challenge us, help us decide on how we can both respect diversity and differences in perspective, values, behaviors and actions, yet can offer us a measure of certainty, consistency and peace in spite of the complexities, turbulence and mysteries of modernity, change, injustice and history.”
Formal work on the second framework began in 2017 when a number of researchers, evaluators, cultural practitioners, and community activists began meeting to reframe the concept of wellbeing through a Native Hawaiian lens to create radical new knowledge. The purpose of this work, named Kūkulu Kumuhana, is to support a research and evaluation agenda that focuses on promotion of wellbeing and self-determination of Native Hawaiians. The framework is holistic, multi-dimensional, and promotes social justice and healing. Six interconnected dimensions include Ea–Self determination, ‘Āina Momona–Healthy and productive land and people, Pilina–Mutually sustaining relationships, Waiwai–Ancestral abundance and collective wealth, and ‘Ōiwi–Cultural identity and Native intelligence.
To ground our workshop in an Indigenous lens, we privilege the following Hawaiian methods: a) haʻi ʻōlelo or lecture/sharing by a kūpuna or elder via video as she explores the complexities of Aloha and by the presenters as they provide an overview of both frameworks ; b) moʻolelo or generative story telling by participants to bring forward personal connections to wellbeing and the intersection of race, colonialism, and power in small groups; and c) hui kūkākūkā or focused group discussions as we delve into unpacking colonial and racist assumptions, and re-pack a deeper understanding of what helps and what hinders healing in the evaluation space.
Individually and, even more powerfully, in combination, the Evaluation with Aloha and Kūkulu Kumuhana frameworks position knowledge of and respect for Indigenous peoples as imperative for valid, ethical, and healing practice. Likewise, both frameworks are expected to influence the future of evaluation and research on wellbeing in Hawaiʻi. Although grounded in Hawaiian culture, these frameworks may be used by evaluators working in other cultural contexts as jumping off places to examine what it means to practice evaluation in ways that are consonant with the values of the communities they serve.