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Session Title: Narrative Control, the Appliance of Science and the Challenge for Independent Evaluation
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Panel Session 805 to be held in Pacific A on Saturday, Nov 5, 8:00 AM to 9:30 AM
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Sponsored by the Evaluation Policy TIG
and the Presidential Strand
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| Chair(s): |
| Saville Kushner, University of the West of England, saville.kushner@uwe.ac.uk
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| Discussant(s):
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| Thomas Schwandt, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, tschwand@illinois.edu
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| Abstract:
Democracy thrives on the proliferation of narratives - a plurality of possible explanations for social and political phenomena. As Chantal Mouffe suggests, argument is the life-blood of democracy, consensus its death-knell. Panelists will take a critical, sometimes dismaying, look at the balance between narrative control (the imposition of single narratives - climate change, economic crisis, educational achievement)and the possibility of narrative contestation. Are evaluators independent of narrative control? Is it our obligation to proliferate explanations - sometimes to be 'inconvenient'? Can we? Are we lost in a sea of consensus? Does narrative control dissolve in localism?
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Speaking Truth to Power
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| Eleanor Chelimsky, Independent consultant, eleanor.chelimsky@gmail.com
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As evaluators beginning a new study, we often find that the question we are asked reposes on some demonstrably inaccurate assumptions. Or we discover, during the execution of the work, that what we are finding is incongruent with quite widely-shared conventional wisdom. Still further, at the end of the study, we may be faced with the difficulties of airing conclusions that are inconvenient to various stakeholders. In some of these cases, we are dealing with "the single narrative," often officially sponsored, and which may or may not have been purposely distorted. I propose to examine some experience in the field with regard to this problem, and sketch out some realistic strategies and tactics for dealing with it.
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The Narrative Control of Educational Standards
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| Robert Stake, University of Illinois, stake@illinois.edu
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As I write this, people are on the streets of Yemen, Libya, Bahrain, Iraq, Algeria, Morocco, Jordan and Oman, protesting central control, supposing democracy will give them more control of their lives. Democracy is a weak hope, if it passes control from dictators to mayors, economists, and parents aspiring to place their children in elite schools. Educational standards are the narrative control over the lives of parents, teachers and children, insisting on a conformance and adherence to the indicators conceived by scientists, in this case, educational evaluators. Strong democracy is the provision of conditions by which local education might thrive. Absent in America is the protest by which democracy might put the control of education into the narratives of teachers and learners. When I speak with this panel, I will have current examples on the expression of people to apply the new media to challenge the constraints of narrative control.
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Independent Evaluation: 'Busted Flush' or Act of Resistance
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| Saville Kushner, University of the West of England, saville.kushner@uwe.ac.uk
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I know there is no economic crisis in the UK - and yet I watch helplessly as a financial coup d'etat is staged by investment bankers. I know climate change has the status only of a hypothesis, and yet I watch as my children's sense of future is stolen away. And I know science is just another base sociology, but I watch as it struts its privileges. Postmodernism was to deliver us from Grand Narratives, dissolve control in an intellectual nursery of playfulness. But all the while the spiders were busy, spinning webs of narrative control, sewing up the media, tightening regulatory systems and performance-managing dissent. We live in a scary world where government has interests independent of its citizenry. Evaluation - what Cronbach called "the process by which society learns about itself", the convenor of public debate - is either a busted flush or an act of resistance.
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