By Celeste Gasperik, Roxana Aguilar, and Jenna Cobb
Community Nature Connection received the opportunity from National Association of Environmental Education's (NAAEE) Values-Based Environmental Education Evaluation (eeVAL) to participate in a Deep Evaluation Learning Journey (DELJ). Our team was grouped with and guided by emerging and expert evaluators using the a Culturally Responsive and Equitable Evaluation values, practices, and framework. This blog post is a reflection on our journey experience and learnings.
The Journey Begins (May - September, 2023)
Learning about the eeVAL
Learning about the values
Meeting our team
Understanding our roles
Floating ideas
Our team approached the DELJ opportunity knowing we wanted to be doing evaluation and doing it equitably, but we didn’t have a clear shared concept of what that might look like. What started out as a feeling of impatience around the perceived lack of structure and a shallow understanding of the values, slowly and painstakingly transformed into the intentional spaciousness necessary for ideas to seed and grow, grounded by the guiding values that held us accountable to each other and to working on evaluation with equity in mind.
eeVAL Values: https://evaluation.naaee.org/values
Building relationships and trust with our team to the point where we were able to forge a path and collaborate toward a shared goal proved challenging. Even so, navigating this challenge as a team allowed us to build a stronger bond and foundation for our work. As we pushed ourselves to put our trust in the process, the values of Shared Learning and Equity in Motion provided the guidance we sought that allowed us to begin to define and redefine our focus.
Prioritizing Values & Setting Intentions (September, 2023 - January, 2024)
Deepening curiosity
Integrating CREE values with organizational values
Intentional focus on authentic engagement
Setting goals and timelines/ determining roles
Bringing in the Community Nature Connection (CNC) team
Our eeVAL team roles evolved throughout the journey as we each gained a deeper curiosity for each other’s values and began to build our team goals while contributing to the process with compassion and understanding. Early on we voiced the need to incorporate multiple voices into our program design and evaluation methods through intentional engagement and qualitative data analysis. Our team focused on redefining the quality of our engagement with each other through intentional dialogue, transparency around our evaluation skill levels, and explored evaluation methods that consisted of genuine care for community members and participant voices. We grappled with a perceived lack of formal structure throughout the journey while being flexible and open to challenging ourselves in the process of searching for equitable frameworks. We realized there was a gap of equitable frameworks in traditional evaluation and our journey began to fill that gap as we incorporated feedback from the eeVAL team. The eeVAL leadership team was available to provide insight and feedback as we found synergy between the eeVAL values and CNC’s organizational values. This led to an intentional deep dive and refinement of our equitable qualitative methods.
Reframing the DELJ as a shared learning journey rather than a training program with a final product made room for curiosity, exploration, deep thought, and intentionality in our group. The team set an intention to incorporate diverse voices through authentic engagement by including the eeVAL team, eeVAL leads, CNC staff, CNC participants, and alumni in the process. Our team aimed to gain a better understanding of participants' connection to nature and how they define nature for themselves. In the last half of our evaluation journey, we were on our way to accomplishing this through collaborative focus group facilitation training for our staff, implementation of focus groups, and qualitative data analysis.
eeVAL processes: https://evaluation.naaee.org/process
Focus Groups & Teamwork (January-April, 2024)
Working with the team
Working with the program leads
Focus Group training session
Focus group guide creation
Focus group implementation
Once our project plans solidified, there was an instinct to rush the process. We only had four months before the official eeVAL Deep Journey Partnership ended, and we needed to train our staff in leading focus groups, recruit for and implement the focus groups, and analyze our data! However, remembering the value of Authentic Engagement, we decided to prioritize genuine relationships and adjust our evaluation timeline accordingly. We recruited a few youth evaluation advisors who gave input on our focus group questions. Also, we practiced going at the speed of trust with our staff and internal evaluation project team. During our first staff focus group training with our emerging evaluators, our staff brought up some tough questions about how to run culturally responsive and equitable focus groups. The evaluators were very responsive to their questions, sharing many resources and dedicating a large portion of our second training to continue addressing staff members’ questions.
Our focus on Authentic Engagement led to the youth participants of our focus groups feeling comfortable and enjoying the experience. One participant shared, “I like all the dialogue that
we had, the questions and everything, like it made it seem like we weren't just in here. It felt like we were actually doing something.” Staff also had positive experiences with many excited to apply this evaluation process to their own programs.
Ongoing Journey & Shared Learning (May - November, 2024)
Continuing the Work Internally
Committee Work & Upskilling
NAAEE Conference and Shared Learning
While the eeVAL DELJ has reached its conclusion, our work on equitable evaluation continues. We founded an evaluation committee at our org and invited our team to continue in shared learning and work on equitable evaluation. We engaged in collaborative upskilling to learn how to complete coding and thematic analysis of our qualitative data. We then produced a visualization and summary of our findings which we intend to share back with participants for participants checks and approvals and then to share with our stakeholders and incorporate the findings into culturally relevant and responsive program design.
In November, 2024 we received the opportunity to attend the NAAEE Conference: Building Bridges in Pittsburgh, PA. We were able to live into the value of Shared Learning by sharing our experience and journey engaging with the eeVAL values and practices. We return home to our work with renewed enthusiasm for engaging in culturally relevant and equitable evaluation. We look forward to sharing our findings soon on how our community connects to nature.
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