Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: cultural responsiveness, evaluation theory, Stafford Hood, nobody knows my name, history of evaluationEach generation out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.(Fanon, 1961).Our quest is to retrieve from near obscurity the work of early contributors and pioneering African American scholars whose work had been excluded from what is taught as the history of educational evaluation research in the United States.Whether this exclusion has been by accident or design, we leave for others to answer.We seek simply to acknowledge, illuminate, and verify our roots as African American evaluators because it is professionally and personally important for us to claim this heritage for the benefit of others who will follow (Hood, 2017, p. 263).And there it is.Enough said.When the first call came on Monday, 16 January (Rev Martin Luther King, Jr. Day) I was enroute to Champaign on I-57 South, returning from a research study/study abroad/holiday in Namibia, southern Africa after the December 2022-January 2023 winter break.While this first call did not go through, the second one did and brought news of the passing of our dear friend and colleague, Stafford Hood.An outpouring of sympathy, tears, and utter shock followed on from this call as the news spread, and this continued for what seems like months.The phone calls, texts, and emails were overwhelming in those first weeks and were filled with immense grief and sorrow.Often with a lump in my throat as they offered me their own condolences, I would remind friends, colleagues and associates who knew of our working and laboring together that his wife, Denice, would continue to need (y)our thoughts and prayers.I also reminded them that Stafford was about the work…and finishing the work.Hood's quote above reflects the very spirit of the work that he was about, and for those that knew him, he had a way of stating the obvious with a smirk, sometimes with a nasal exhaled puff of air that would reinforce the matter of fact.In a Fanonian sense, Hood has helped to discover a purpose and mission for those of us who have histories not obvious in the field of evaluationexcluded histories, not told or known. 1 In fact, that quote is from Hood's final published paper in AJE, the second-to-last installment in the Nobody Knows My Name 2 historical and archival evaluation project that he birthed
Source: American Journal of Evaluation
Author: Rodney Hopson
Institution: American University
Language: English
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4390746476