Eval Cafe – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Did you miss us, listeners? Your erstwhile podcast hosts are back in the saddle! Or back on the bicycle? Whatever metaphor we eventually landed on, this is our first published episode in over two years! A little rusty, but we're pretty sure being a little unpolished is part of our charm, right?

In this episode, we catch you up on what we've been doing, including Brian's capstone project, C's evaluation workshop, and a paper on queer evaluation we have been writing with some of our colleagues. As ever, no promises about a regular release schedule in the future, but we're excited to be sitting around the metaphorical coffee table again!

If you want more evaluation podcast content, please check out the other shows we mentioned in this episode, including the Evaluland podcast, Community Possibilities, the Glass Frog podcast, and one we forgot to say but is also amazing, Radical (Re)imagining!

Full show notes, including links to all the things we talked about, available on our website.

Find out more at https://eval-cafe.pinecast.co

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Double the Carolyn’s, double the depth of conversation! We’re joined this week by Carolyn Hoessler, facilitator, curriculum developer, evaluator, and Founder of Higher Education and Beyond. After a brief chat on evaluation in higher education contexts, we dive into the topics of sense-making and evaluative thinking, covering What-So What-Now What, the Cynefin framework, children as complex adaptive systems, and the power of saying “I don’t know”. Plus, Brian takes some time to answer the question “Is water wet?”, and Carolyn Camman says something nice about the field of evaluation.

Full show notes available on our website.

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We’ve mentioned it in passing in multiple episodes, but today we go into a deep dive on the Evaluation for Social Change and Transformational Learning program (course? certificate?) offered through Simon Fraser University. Joining us in this conversation are Kim van der Woerd (also our first repeat guest!), Billie Joe Rogers, and Sofia Vitalis from Reciprocal Consulting to share their perspectives as designers and instructors in the program’s first year. We talk about personal and social transformations, the intertwining of evaluation and leadership, the weaponization of data, and the importance of saying hello to a problem before you can say goodbye to it.

Full show notes available on our website.

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Grab your favourite art supplies and summon up your creative muse! In this episode, we're joined by Andy Johnson, the other co-founder of Creative Evaluation & Engagement (along with his wife, Nora Murphy Johnson, who joined us a few episodes back to talk about evaluating from the heart) to talk about arts-based evaluation and bringing creativity into our evaluation practice. We learn about how Andy has brought poetry, theatre, kinetic sculpture and more into his evaluation methodology, how being a novelist helps him and his clients understand and work in complexity, the difference between prototyping and rehearsal, why evaluators need to channel our inner McGyvers, and how an attention to arts, creativity, and the whole person can help us move evaluation toward equity and justice.

Full show notes available on our website

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In this episode, Carolyn and Brian are joined by Michael Quinn Patton for a deep dive into principles-focused evaluation (PFE). Despite some technical glitches en route, we persisted to discuss the relation of PFE to social innovation, examples of how principles are being used, the role of reflection in PFE, and how our grad school statistics class would be different if we took it today.

Full show notes available on our website.

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Rita Fierro (of Fierro Consulting LLC and DrRitaWrites.com), a multifaceted practitioner of evaluation and facilitation, joins Brian and Carolyn on a deep exploration of the fractal nature of social transformation, trauma and healing, and how our evaluation practices can weave through these complex spaces. From the pursuit of “beloved community” to how we handle our own healing work to working with leaders and being leaders ourselves to what stories we tell and want to be telling to vicarious trauma in evaluation work to what it means to embrace our emotions without letting them drive, we cover it all. Be sure to check out the blog post that inspired and informed this conversation: Social Change is a Fractal Thing

Full show notes available on our website

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In theory, this episode was a chance for us to review how we’re doing with our intentions for 2019. And we get there, we promise! En route, we discuss routines and systems, what comes after March Madness, Carolyn’s inability to unsubscribe from email lists, Brian’s allergic reaction to the SMART acronym, and crises singular and collective. We also get a (non-) update from Brian on the Year of the Trombone,and Carolyn hosts a TED talk partway through. Plus, an #evalmemes challenge for our listeners!

Full show notes available on our website

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In this episode, we’re joined by Nora Murphy Johnson, co-founder of Creative Evaluation, which focuses on evaluation for truth, beauty, and justice. In a conversation about evaluation for healing and change, evaluation as sacred work and a noble calling, Nora tells us about the winding path she has taken as an evaluator, how her relationship with her husband, an artist and evaluator himself, informs the work they do together, how she’s working to bring embodiment to her practice and why it matters, and gives us a glimpse into how the first Creative Evaluation cohort is exploring new ways to understand and do evaluation. It’s a beautiful and powerful conversation filled with touching and profound insights on how we can, in Nora's words, do “heart-centred evaluation”.

CONTENT NOTE: To help you make an informed decision about when and how you want to listen to this episode, we wanted to let you know that this episode will touch on the death of a young child from illness as well as systemic racist violence and the implications of this for loved ones.

Full episode notes available at our website.

Find out more at https://eval-cafe.pinecast.co

Carolyn and Brian are joined this week by former-Saskatonian-now-Haligonian Evan Poncelet to talk about journeys through the field of evaluation. Topics of discussion include DIY bricolage approaches to ongoing learning, whether Evan is REAL, experiences with awkwardly-worded emails, and the perils of clumping.

Full show notes available on our website.

Find out more at https://eval-cafe.pinecast.co

Kick things off right with Brian and Carolyn as we tackle one of the most deep and profound philosophical questions facing the field of evaluation—how do you even start one of these things!? Where do you begin with evaluation? What does it take to unravel the story behind the evaluation purpose? Why give people fake findings? What are the assumptions that can get you off on the wrong foot? What’s the value of a dumb question? How do we avoid the method trap? How does going slow help us go faster? And, most important of all, who’s actually going to listen all the way through that part in the middle where we got distracted talking about our respective file organization systems? Tune in and find out!

Full episode notes available at our website.

Find out more at https://eval-cafe.pinecast.co