Presenter: Jennifer Jewiss
Date: 25 October 2022
The presenter had reflective questions for the audience, so I figured I’d put mine here, along with my notes from the webinar.
Reflective questions 1: When I think of qualitative approaches to evaluation, the following words come to mind:
- open
- emergent
- unexpected
- nuance
- deep
- devalued by some
- harder than people think
They put together a book on qualitative methods in evaluation with chapters authored by many evaluators, then identified themes of what makes up quality in qualitative inquiry:
- acknowledging who you are and what you bring to the work (you)
- positionality
- how do facets of your identity, history, etc. intersect
- how does it enrich and limit your work as an evaluator?
- what blind spots do you have? what learning do you need to do?
- building and maintaining trusting relationships (us)
- throughout the entire evaluation
- employing sound & explicit methodology (process
- a wide array of things that can be done in qualitative inquiry
- staying true to the data (what we find)
- hearing and representing the voices and perspectives of participants
- be really conscious of what you might be bringing to bear on the data (our own priorities, biases, desires) – monitor that to “keep it in its proper place”
- fostering learning (what we learn)
- helping everyone involved learn, including ourselves
- open-ended learning helps people to surface that tacit knowledge
- these things are not unique to qualitative
- a cycle, not linear. They wanted a spiral/dynamic diagram, but publisher suggested a cycle would be more clear
Reflective question 2: how might one use this model to information qualitative evaluation practice?
- presenter suggested that each of these elements could be a prompt for reflective writing or reflective art (drawing, collages, etc.)
