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Roundtable

Graduate Students and New Evaluators

Positioning Evaluation to Challenge the Status Quo: Perspectives from graduate and undergraduate evaluation students

Stream: Professional Development and Leadership

Friday, October 25, 2024
10:15 AM - 11:15 AM PST
Location: Portland Ballroom 254
Abstract Information: Globalization, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and shifting politics are dramatically changing the landscape of evaluation, evaluation training, and evaluation capacity building. Nevertheless, we remain steadfast in our belief that evaluation can and should be positioned as a social, cultural, and political force to address issues of inequity. As new evaluators, we have been trained to meaningfully and respectfully attend to issues of culture, race, diversity, power, inclusion, and equity in evaluation. During this panel, graduate and undergraduate students with diverse intersecting identities in the STEM Program Evaluation Lab at Arizona State University will provide our perspectives on the following tensions: 1) the potential and challenges of practicing culturally responsive evaluation in a shrinking world where technology both exacerbates and ameliorates issues of equity; 2) the need to embrace and become trained in AI to increase productivity and efficiency, while carefully examining outputs for inequity; 3) the desire to challenge the status quo and advocate for justice, while the backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusions (DEI) grows and becomes institutionalized. While respectfully attending to culturally responsive, equity-focused, and values-engaged theoretical roots, we squarely position our perspectives in and for praxis. Our examples and experiences are drawn from half a dozen United States National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, and Department of Education-funded project evaluations. Our existence in the field contributes to the diversity, sustainability, and evolution of evaluation, and our vantage point as new evaluators affords a unique perspective on the aforementioned issues.