Pedagogy of Praxis: Undergraduate Student/Instructor Reflections on teaching Evaluation for Program Planning & Design in the Global South

Abstract Information: Habib University is the first undergraduate liberal arts university in Pakistan now in its 10th year. Our four-year Social Development and Policy (SDP) program aims to provide students with tools to engage with the development industrial complex from an interdisciplinary, decolonizing, global south perspective. The program combines traditional social sciences, contextual knowledge, and experience to move from critical deconstruction to reconstruction drawing on a vision of praxis. Designing and delivering the learning and evaluation component of a program planning and design course over the last five years for SDP has been a creative yet challenging experiment given the technocratic approach used in the industry to teach skill sets like developing a theory of change, budgeting, writing a funding proposal, and developing a monitoring and evaluation framework. The goal of the course is to ensure that students are reflective of their privilege/positionality as future practitioners/researchers/policymakers and are able to recognize the ethical implications and power dynamics embedded in the programming design choices they make, and the effect it can have on the communities they serve, while also gaining practical skills to meet industry needs. This paper is a collaborative endeavor between students and instructor to critically reflect on the feminist pedagogy embodied in the course, the experiential learning offered, and its implications for student learning across its various iterations.