What’s it like when the participatory evaluator is a “genuine” stakeholder?

Abstract

In this reflective, analytic story I discuss what it is like to be a parent and an evaluator in a participatory, democratic evaluation of an afterschool program. The story tells of tensions between these roles, and how these tensions can instruct participatory evaluators in pursuing goals of democracy, community, and justice in evaluation. This discussion can be situated among a number of recent articles in AJE that have focused on analyses of participatory or empowerment evaluation. (See Schnoes, Murphy-Berman, & Chambers, 2000; and the exchanges between Smith, 1999 and Cousins & Earl, 1999.)