Workshop description: 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.
Workshop Description: This workshop describes the four foundational elements of an Indigenous approach to evaluation. These include recognizing the power of metaphor, grounding evaluation in Indigenous Ways of Knowing, defining core values that guide practice, and building inclusive community engagement. The foundations are based on research regarding Indigenous evaluation conducted by the American Higher Education Consortium in tribal communities and colleges. Each element draws from Indigenous practices and ways of knowing such as storytelling, community engagement, and relationship. The foundations serve as guideposts for evaluators who seek cultural/tribal relevant approaches to evaluation. During the workshop, each of the foundations will be described and discussed. The workshop is designed to engage participants in the foundational elements through small group exercises that encourage application of the elements to local tribal and community situations.
Workshop Description: While ideas of fairness and equity are, for the most part, embraced across our society, their underlying values, characterization, interpretation, and markers are highly contested. In such contexts as criminal justice, education, tax and health policy, voting rights, and immigration, advocates adopt the rhetoric of fairness and equity, albeit with very different meanings. These different conceptions of fairness and equity almost always intersect with issues of economics, politics, religion, education, power, gender, and race.
Regarding educational assessment, concerns about fairness and equity have likewise mirrored a universal embrace of the rhetoric of fairness and equity. Yet, discussions of fairness and equity in assessment often prove unproductive as different constituencies talk past each other, using the same terms with little shared meaning.
Through this workshop, participants will: (1) Gain a deeper understanding of the differences between psychometric and racial justice perspectives of fariness ; (2) Conceptualize a learning and/or action agenda that engages both perspectives.
In the first portion of this workshop, facilitators will review the different meanings, assumptions, lenses and operationalization of the ideas of “assessment fairness” and attempt to provide a framework for understanding the consistencies and differences in the ways that different measurement experts, researchers, and theorists have addressed these concepts. Specifically, we unpack the ideas of fairness among two broad communities concerned with educational assessment, that have historically worked in isolation from one another. The testing and measurement community contributes to the design, development, and research of educational assessments. The racial justice community members work to help elevate voices of racially marginalized groups and are critical of the contributing role of assessment to marginalization.
In the second portion of this workshop, participants will begin to conceptualize a learning and/or action agenda for themselves, that engages both psychometric and racial justice perspectives on fairness.