Читать книгу Evaluation in Today’s World - Veronica G. Thomas - Страница 114

Published accounts of evaluation’s historical roots and evolution are relatively scant. The few existing histories were written in the 1990s or early 2000s, and they often covered narrow aspects of evaluation’s evolution such as theories or 20th-century developments. Shadish and Luellen (2005) wrote a brief history of evaluation in the Encyclopedia of Evaluation. Probably the most comprehensive and frequently cited historical overview is Madaus and Stufflebeam’s (2000) chapter characterizing evaluation over seven periods from 1792 to 2001. Stufflebeam and Coryn (2014) extended this historical overview to also include accounts of events from 2005 to 2014. Accounts of how evaluation has continued to evolve during the 21st century are still quite limited.

Since evaluations, in some form, have taken place over the many centuries in various arenas, chronicling the full history of evaluation in a single chapter is virtually impossible. There exist far too many events, theoretical and methodological perspectives, influential figures, and evolving trends to cover. In this chapter, we seek to provide a historical account of evaluation that infuses a social justice lens within our synthesis by situating evaluation within the political, sociocultural, and racialized contexts of the times. Existing published historical accounts virtually ignore the early contributions of persons who were engaged in evaluative efforts to advance social justice agendas. Hopson and Hood (2005, p. 88) argue that “the rich intellectual history of the evaluation profession may be improvised as a result of an overemphasis by those who some have anointed as ‘fathers’ (or ‘mothers’, in recent history) of the field.” We seek to redress this by providing a historical account that is more inclusive of important, but often ignored, events and people who utilized evaluation as a tool to ameliorate prominent social inequities of the time.