Learning with and through Evaluation as Social Practice

Abstract

Social practice views of learning attend to the situatedness of learning and the co-emergence of persons and practices. We argue that the role of evaluation in designs for learning should be viewed from this same social practice lens. We present initial findings from an evaluation survey project at a high school seeking to enact improvement measures. Using the survey as a case study, we show that evaluators make consequential boundary judgments that either restrict or expand what counts as legitimate knowledge in a given situation as well as whose stakeholder’s interests are validated.