Cases Integrating Ethnography and Evaluation: Making Transformative, Intersectional, and Comparative Connections

Cases Integrating Ethnography and Evaluation examines the connections between ethnography and evaluation in educational spaces, wrestling with pressing justice and equity issues in today’s societies across the world. The book provides readers from different disciplines and practice areas with detailed accounts of evaluation and ethnographic practice. Contributing chapters employ contemporary ethnographic strategies for engaging people, collecting data, generating knowledge, and taking action to make a social impact. Concentrating on underrepresented and historically marginalized communities, authors describe evaluations that emphasize the use of fieldwork, participant observation, arts-based strategies, and Indigenous methods to explore the cultural and contextual specificity of educational spaces. Such evaluations pursue greater democracy and justice in educational policy, programs, and systems through forging trusting and reciprocal relationships with individuals and communities. The chapters situate inquiry in the contested histories and policies of contexts—as they are globally, nationally, and locally defined. Authors present productive fusions of interpretivist and transformative epistemologies, emphasizing both emic understandings and critical framings of social issues. Describing the pursuit of transformative work in collaboration with a diversity of people, these chapters ultimately investigate issues of equity, marginalization, self-determination, (mis)representation, and cultural sustainability in inquiry as well as in education.