Setting in motion a toolkit of participatory media methods for ‘rigorous’ evaluation and learning
Title Listening and learning: adapting participatory media methods for ‘rigorous’ evaluation and learning
Summary description Recent calls for rigour and results in evaluation practice can lead to marginalisation of qualitative practices and methods. We have presented participatory, people-centred evaluation processes in proposals to INGOs for project evaluations, and been told that although they loved the focus on learning they did not think the methodology acceptable for the donor. Yet, when we have used participatory media to enable young people to reflect on their goals and expectations, achievements and challenges, to document learning and provide feedback to organisations managing projects in which they are involved, we have had positive feedback and from all involved, young people and the NGO at different levels. THey have aprreciated the opportunity to reflect and adjust their own action, but also the evaluation outputs for the powerful communication of the work and context, and the learning and evidence of quality and effective programming for future use. What’s more, since the analysis and reflection by young people provides a basis for further research and validation, including of quantitative data, the final outputs include rigorous evidence and data analysis. It also fits with Hannah’s previous research for IKM Emergent on knowledge sharing, interpretation and dialogue across the levels of work in INGOs.
This experience has strengthened our conviction that these types of participatory reflection processes can deliver not only to the needs of people involved in projects and NGOs, but also to their donors. We would like to document and systematise our methods and evidence in order to strengthen our arguments that qualitative and participatory can also mean rigorous, that things do not have to be measurable to count.
WE see this innovation fund as an opportunity to draw together our experience of using participatory video and media facilitation and documentation methods, and other methods derived from an understanding of complexity in evaluation (such as critical stories of change), to develop a basic toolkit in PM4E, if you like. This would provide a basis for others (and us) to adapt and extend, bringing in other experiences of using these types of methods for evaluation and organisational learning.
Relevance and potential benefit to the KM4Dev community
This would be useful for us to continue promoting this participatory approach to evaluation of social change and rights based work, and would also be available to the KM4Dev community to use, or as a draft basis manual to develop within the community toolkit as you/we see fit. I think it is a good fit, because much of my engagement with other KM4Dev members has been around exploration of complexity and evaluation, and the difficulty of constructing learning dialogue or sharing across (potential) barriers of language, culture, geography, power etc. This is an attempt to take those concepts of equity, communication and power within organisational learning and evaluation and make something practical for use by consultants and development activists alike. We would wish to leave a copy on the KM4Dev wiki under creative commons license to be used, updated etc as decided appropriate.
who is involved This proposal is put together by Hannah Beardon and Amy Barbor. Hannah is a member of KM4Dev, freelance consultant working on evaluation and research with a focus on learning and participation/ power. Amy is co-founder and director of Living Lens, a social enterprise focusing on participatory video.
Funding requirements We do not have a specific plan for this work, so we would welcome funding for time to put our experiences and ideas on (electronic) paper. For this we can propose a budget of $4000 for a week’s full work. We would also be able to facilitate a participatory workshop for KM4Dev members if this was logistically possible and desirable...
