Time to blog.....I spoke with Ingrid Friday for a while about if vistas have participated in any sort of roundtable discussion/feedback about their program experience and she said no, not to her knowledge;  she also thought this would be something good for the program.  I shared our discussion about a possible focus group with the vistas as a way of getting feedback on the program and for example giving us more insight into parent/family involvement;  Ingrid was amenable to the such a possibility and felt it would be something positive for the program.

Next did a little at a glance at the work of Jualynne Dodson, interesting and more to come;  we both also share an interest in the study of the Black Church and its role in human development.  Back to GEAR UP.....  I did go on the Department of Education's website to locate possible examples of mixed method or qualitative research and in particular as it relates to parent/family involvement;  the result zero.  I did go on to research the site and found non GEAR UP related exemplars of innovative strategies for family, school and community engagement published in March 2010.  There is a National Family, School and Community Engagement Working Group.  I have the executive summary of the doc and i can share with you on Friday.  Two projects that with interesting family strategies were the New Visions for Public Schools out of NY and Tellin Stories out of DC.  The former teaches parents how to use student data to support high school graduation and college readiness and the latter home school relationships.

Today i spent time reading Stanford's Social Innovation Review; social innovation is defined as " a novel solution to a social problem that is more efficient, effective, sustainable or just than existing solutions..... family and community engagement in student learning is a fundamental innovation in itself". Questions i posed from the readings/research:

1.  Does Gear UP partner with any family/parent organizations, associations...?
2.  How much of a voice do parents have in shaping the GEAR UP experience?
3.  Is there an opportunity for students, families and parents to tell their stories?

In looking at the review's issue and focus for the month--evaluation and global philanthropy
an article by Judith Rodin and Nancy MacPherson posit interesting insights for our GEAR UP project-- rethinking, re framing and reforming evaluation.  They are as follows:

1.  Broaden inclusion of stakeholders in evaluations;  only when the voices of those whose lives we seek 2 impact are heard, respected and internalized will we be able to effectively evaluate with success.
2.  Broaden the objectives of evaluation to learn more....beyond the individual grant:  frame evaluation to take into account the drivers of unsustainability and causes of challenge being addressed to provide greater learning beyond the intervention.
3.  Regard evaluation knowledge as public good and share it:  an example of this i personally experienced was at NC A&T where a annual CD was produced called Solutions and it simply was families, individuals sharing the impact of Cooperative Extensions work on their lives--very powerful piece and here is an idea from me--maybe this is something parents could help produce or even a documentary, particularly with     the film industry becoming a more integral part of this community.

Ok that's all folks.  Got to work on bactchgeo  :) :(