Validity: Through Whose Eyes? by Karen Kirkhart

Validity: Through Whose Eyes? on March 16^th, 2016, from 1:00-5:00PM, at McREL International - 4601 DTC Blvd. Denver 80237 (see event description and Dr. Kirkhart's bio below).

Validity is a privileged concept in assessment, research, and evaluation. Myriad scholars have critically examined validity from variety of vantage points … all toward the end of contributing to an enhanced understanding of what it is and why it is of crucial importance in evaluation practice. Whatever your point of entry, conversations on validity are dynamic, multifaceted, contested, and situated…and always interesting. Please join us for a session with Dr. Karen Kirkhart, a self-professed “validity enthusiast,” fascinated by the diverse perspectives on and locations of validity, both for they reveal and what they conceal. Her work on validity asks questions about how we can determine whether we can trust our understandings and recommend appropriate actions based upon them. She is especially committed to understanding validity as a cultural construct and to examining the dynamics of privilege that surround its use. Her COEN workshop will address the parameters of the construct, examine justifications of validity from multiple perspectives, and suggest a schema for moving multicultural validity theory into evaluation practice.

Dr. Kirkhart’s work on multicultural validity seeks to bring issues of cultural competence to the forefront of the evaluation profession by centering validity theory in culture. Her work places evaluation in the broader contexts of power, privilege, intention, and consequences, interweaving ethics and validity. She is a renowned scholar in the area of multicultural evaluation and has collaborated with the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC) in their development of an Indigenous Evaluation Framework. She was also a member of the writing team for the AEA Public Statement on Cultural Competence in Evaluation. She has been active in the evaluation profession for over thirty-five years and served as President of the American Evaluation Association (AEA) in 1994. Her leadership has been recognized with the Robert Ingle Award for Outstanding Service to the AEA.

Dr. Kirkhart is currently Professor, School of Social Work, David B. Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics, at Syracuse University, where she teaches graduate courses in both program evaluation and clinical practice evaluation.