Arts, Culture, and Museums
Maya Lefkowich, PhD (she/her/hers)
Director & Senior Consultant
AND implementation
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Jennica Nichols, MPH, CE (she/her/hers)
Director & Senior Consultant
AND implementation
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Location: Room 205
Abstract Information: Let’s be honest – we don’t want to answer another survey either. As evaluators, we benefit from a plurality of practices that elevate joy and diverse wisdom, for ourselves and our collaborators. Arts-based methods facilitate enriching, meaningfully messy, and – dare we say fun – ways to collaborate, collect data, and practice reflexivity. But, like any other method, they don’t always work. From four years of testing and refining our arts-based evaluation practice with our clients, collaborators, and learning community, we gained insights into what works (when and with whom) and what doesn’t (both online and in-person). Anchored in practice, this humorous and informative expert lecture explores stories and lessons learned from getting it right and missing the mark. Teasing out nuggets of wisdom, we offer strategies and tips for using arts-based techniques, navigating ethics, getting buy-in from skeptics, and continuing to evolve our creative evaluation practice. This session will appeal to evaluators at all levels of experience who are curious about creative practice.
Relevance Statement: This session contributes fresh perspectives on evaluation practice and methodology with special attention paid to ethics, integrity, reflexive practice, and context-specific solutions. Responding to the growing demand for evaluation techniques that embrace diverse worldviews and forms of self-expression, mitigate risks of extractive data collection, and overcome participation fatigue, this session offers timely reflections, tips for practice, and strategies for evaluators (of any career stage or level of experience). This expert lecture explores and embraces the conference theme of storytelling in evaluation in two ways. (1) Illustrative narrative vignettes are used to share real-world examples of evaluation techniques in practice. Story-based explorations of what worked (when and for whom) and what didn’t (why and what lessons was learned from failing) are both informative and entertaining. (2) The specific arts-based methods explored in this session speak to how rich narrative data can be elicited in evaluation. As arts-based methods that are growing in popularity in evaluation, this session contributes important insights that support evaluator competencies (1.1, 1.3, 2.4, 2.10, 2.12, 3.1, 3.2, 5.1, 5.2, 5.7)