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Biography
The first decade of my career was dedicated to the early childhood field, where I worked in a variety of roles including, quality improvement, professional development and career pathways, and data and systems building. Overseeing the professional development of early childhood educators in Denver, I was able to gain many skills in adult learning and facilitation. Empowering the early childhood workforce will always be an area of deep passion for me.I had always dabbled in program evaluation and admired the learning that it could bring, and recently completed my Master's in Research and Evaluation Methods at University of Colorado, Denver. I have since been working as a consultant in program evaluation, helping a wide variety of programs work towards a greater understanding of their impact and partnership with their communities.
Research Interests
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Program Evaluation, Research methods (quantitative and qualitative), Early Childhood Education (ECE), elevating the ECE workforce
Teaching Interests
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I came to evaluation before I even formally knew what it was- as a program manager at a nonprofit, just trying to understand what we were doing in my program and if it was leading to the changes we wanted to see. My goal in this was to continuously learn and grow the impact of my department. As I continue to learn about the formal, practical, and theoretical sides of evaluation, I know that I will never lose that core perspective of someone who has to use the results to improve their program and better support their community.
While practical use and applied learning may be my focus, I am now able to apply many more approaches and tools as compared to when I first stumbled upon program evaluation. Of these, I feel the most essential is incorporating the principles of social justice and equity within every step of the evaluation. Evaluation is positioned in such a way that it can reinforce traditionally held inequities or “business as usual” ways of doing things and viewing the world, but this means it can also help to break down those same inequities. This can be time-consuming and difficult work, since it involves revisiting and revising the principles upon which evaluation was originally founded to update them for a more equitable approach, process, and outcome.
Of established evaluation theories, mine may most closely align to Fetterman’s Empowerment Evaluation (1994). I appreciate that this approach ties together a focus on re-making systems (societal, programmatic, and personal) with the principles of adult learning through its participatory approach. The program I managed that first drove me to dabble in evaluation was leading the professional development department for early childhood educators. With this background, I also deeply value the adult learning practices that lead to real-world knowledge, skill acquisition, and behavior changes. Ultimately, my hope is that anyone who participates in an evaluation process with me will walk away proud of the learning they have accomplished, ready to implement the changes we discovered, and confident they can continue the work of learning and improving collaboratively, even without me present