Workshop Leaders were:
A lively and frank session that enabled participants to get to grips with some tricky issues in a supportive atmosphere.
Any end-of-conference lethargy was dispelled with some lively activities that enabled us to consider our personal stances towards evaluation whilst also generating some body heat to counter the Manchester cold.
Nicky started with a dictionary definition of evaluation:
- ‘To judge or determine quality or worth’.
Discussions followed that tackled just how difficult this is to do, with a consensus emerging that it is actually not possible to do this with absolute objectivity, and that what should be looked for instead is validity.
Contextualising your evaluation is crucial to supporting this goal. We looked at a number of case studies, which raised many issues around the need to respond to the interests of participants in the evaluation just as much as we would do in the project itself.
Many of the participants had gone to the earlier Matarasso session, and felt that this later one had been a great opportunity to extend those debates in a more practical context.
