Really good day for revisiting the Kery Daly article on the theories that families live by.   He uses the metaphor of negative spaces as a way of thinking about important aspects of family life that educators and family scientist fail to capture and that we choose to foreground in studying families.   Daly goes on to state that one reason why this failure occurs is that we are the primary consumers of knowledge produced.  I also revisited Lev Vygotsky's work on the context of education and human development. Some key points for insights into GEAR UP evaluation:

1.  How can we capture the experience of being family? For example
what is the everyday reality of gear up families?
2.  What is the socio-historical context and the narrative of gear up families and communities?
3.  What is the cultural matrix of gear up program context?
4.  "Greatest irony in family theory is the reluctance to talk about love in contemporary family process"
5.  Family stories represent a critical cultural vehicle for how families define themselves:  what they believe, what they value and how they act.
6.  How does or can gear up evoke a new cultural cartography in first generation college bound youth ?
7.  What does the negative space of print involvement look like--activities/roles parents engage in or do to support their child's participation that is not captured in current evaluation process?