The annual gathering of New Zealand evaluators will focus on “Our House, Our Whare, Our Fale: Building Strong Evaluation in Aotearoa New Zealand”. The wananga is being held in Wellington 7-10 July 2014.
The two-day Aotearoa New Zealand Evaluation Association conference features opportunities for Māori, Pasifika and Pakeha to caucus as well as keynote addresses, over 40 workshops, presentations, panel discussions and a fireside chat.
There are many topics relevant to people working in the Tangata Whenua, community and voluntary sector.
This includes a workshop by Garth Nowland-Foreman, a Co-Chair of Community Research, who will be talking about “Designing a Programme to support TWCVS organisations to understand and report on their effectiveness and results”, and a panel discussion which Kaitiaki Kataraini Pipi joins on “Whānau Ora Action Research – an opportunity and challenge for building strong evaluation in Aotearoa”.
Other topics being addressed include:
- Evaluating a community funding strategy across multi-site projects aiming to reduce alcohol-related harm
- Te Whare Tapa Whā: Providing the structure for conceptualising and measuring youth outcomes for mainstream policy, practice and funding needs
- Understanding social change in community action: Reconciling complexity
- Building evaluation into new projects – a developmental evaluation journey with a Māori and Pacific NGO – Lessons Learnt
- ‘Hangaia te anga arotake’ – Building an evaluation design with whānau in Kura Kaupapa Māori.
Some of the latest thinking on evaluation will be shared in keynotes by Nan Wehipeihana, Jane Davidson, Peter Davis, Karen E. Kirkhart, and Stephanie Evergreen. Both Karen and Stephanie are visiting from the USA. Dr. Kirkhart’s work on multicultural validity seeks to bring issues of cultural competence to the centre of the evaluation profession. Stephanie is best known for bringing a research-based approach to helping evaluators better communicate their work.
“Evaluation 101: The Basics, Introduction to Evaluation” workshop
This entry-level workshop charts the main ideas, practices and challenges (and some of the solutions) in evaluation – in a clear, practical and straightforward way.
This half day workshop is being led by Syd King (NZCA) and Kate McKegg (Kinnect Group). The workshop fee is $110.
The workshop will give participants an overview of key evaluation concepts and practice, including:
- What is evaluation? How do we think about evaluation and evaluation practice?
- What is evaluation for – why do it?
- Some important ideas – quality, value, importance
- Evaluation practice – how do you “do evaluation”?
- Where evaluation comes from and the language used in evaluation
- Evaluative thinking and reasoning and the evaluative attitude and mind-set
- Evaluator competencies – what do you need to be able to do evaluation?
- Who evaluates the evaluator? – the importance of meta-evaluation