51 - On Becoming Undisciplined: How Valuing a Non-Traditional Entrance Into the Field of Evaluation Creates Space for Diverse and Emerging Voices

Abstract Information: Evaluation is a strategy to discover new knowledge and understand varying narratives about the world. However, the world is changing due to technology, increasing costs of higher education, and more value placed on experiential learning and transferable skills. The next generation is embracing more nontraditional career paths that will help create a stronger future together, but they need the career opportunities to do so. The narratives surrounding who can and cannot be an evaluator often discourage nontraditional talent. UBUNTU Research & Evaluation (UBUNTU) will lead a conversation on the value of becoming Undisciplined in this birds of a feather. As a team of nontraditional Afrofuturist evaluators who entered the field without formal evaluation training, practice, and allegiance to any singular academic discipline, we see this as an asset, not a deficit, to our work. Attendees will gain insight on how to utilize many ways of learning, embrace conflict and loving contradictions as a means of generating new and innovative liberatory thought and practice, and build the container for Undisciplined evaluators to learn, fail, and grow into the evaluators they are capable of becoming.