Evaluation of Program Design for “Combating Oppression and Championing Empowerment in Higher Education Workplaces”

Group Members and Roles:

Group Members	Roles	Commented On
Alyssa McGrath	Submit final text of Program Evaluation by April 2nd Collect and share evaluations from professionals (unless other members have closer connections with those professionals). Edit responses for cohesion Insert tables into project for group members to fill out Write the group reflection by answering questions listed under #4 in the assignment directions in syllabus	Self-Directed Learning (Group 3); Narrative Learning (Group 2)
Lisa Melby	Respond to the feedback from professional #2 by answering questions listed under #3 in the assignment directions in syllabus Enter this information into the table listed under #5 in the assignment directions in syllabus	Self-Directed Learning (Group 3);
Michael Szajewski	Respond to the feedback from professional #1 by answering questions listed under #3 in the assignment directions in syllabus Enter this information into the table listed under #5 in the assignment directions in syllabus	Humanistic Learning (Group 4); Experiential Learning (Group 1)

Link to Program Design:

http://edac634feministpedagogy.blogspot.com/2017/03/program-design-for-combating-oppression.html#more

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Professionals’ Evaluations:

Evaluator #1: Learning and development/human resources educator at research university in Midwestern United States.

(Full name and qualifications to be kept confidential in public space)

Summary of comments from Evaluator #1:

Participation: Will the training course be mandatory? Use of the term “required” infers that it is mandatory. If so, administrative offices at your institution (department of human resources, academic affairs or provost’s office) would need to lend support to this requirement.

Staff: Is this term used generically, as in all non-faculty employees? Staff is an employment category at many institutions. Some institutions categorize employees in groups such as faculty, professional staff, paraprofessional staff, service staff, etc.  

Training Costs: Any hourly employees would need to be paid their hourly rates for attendance at these training classes. This could result in a considerable additional expense to your institution.

Number of Sessions: Eight sessions, 90 minutes each, is a large time commitment. Has your institution conducting similar training programs on other topics that have required this level of commitment?  Perhaps a consideration.

Presenters: The proposal did not mention gender or racial identities of the presenters. To be more inclusive, it may be advisable to use multiple presenters, representing various gender identities and racial backgrounds.

Evaluator #2:  Graduate Student Trustee, Board of Trustees, Communications Doctoral Student with Women’s Studies Certificate, Graduate Teaching Assistant, School of Media & Communication in Midwestern United States.

Things I like:

•    I like the overall idea behind the website.

•    I like the introduction and rationale.

•    Love bell hooks.

•    Really great job with the practical examples.

◦       Look into some Arts Based Research stuff from Sandra Faulkner (i.e. poetry, collages, visual methods). You could use some of that as feminist methods in training sessions.

•    I think the sessions are well thought out. They are really strong and the reading choices you selected for the sessions are intriguing, which is good!

•    Overall, I REALLY liked the concepts behind this initiative. I think it is a much needed training that needs to happen on more college campuses.

Suggestions I have:

•    I encourage you all to rethink the color scheme and the design, it is not visually appealing.

•    I don't really care about your roles or what you commented on. I would MUCH rather see your name followed by degrees/education/research interests/contact information. This establishes ethos.

•    I do think that 90 minutes a week for 8 weeks is too much. I would do one of two things: 1) reduce it to 60 min. a week over 8 weeks OR 2) 90 min. every other week over 16 weeks. Your call on whether or not you change this. I worry about burnout and attrition rates.

•    I think the 1997 citation in the abstract is a little dated, I would encourage you to keep that citation, but maybe find some current literature to support your claim. (I.e. Patricia Leavy, Patricia Hill Collins, Radhika Gajjala, Sandra Faulkner, Arthur P. Bochner, etc.). They talk a lot about reflexivity, feminist theory, activism. I am actually concerned with all of the citations, they are dated. What is happening in the CURRENT literature (2014-present)?

•    I am wondering about the paragraph in white in the rationale section as it sticks out for no reason.  

•    I would pull some citations from SHRM's (Society of Human Resource Management) website when you talk about human resources. They are a very credible organization in the HR world.

•    Again, the white paragraph in "Challenging Hegemony..." section is distracting.

•    Deanna Fassett and John T. Warren have a (2003) book on Critical Pedagogy; that may be useful with your project. I believe they touch on feminist pedagogy as well.

•     For the emotion literature, there is a TON of stuff out there that is more current. I am most familiar with the communication literature (see, Sarah J. Tracy, Sally Planalp, Katherine Miller, Vincent Waldron, etc.) check some of it out. I also encourage you to build on that section. It is a little short compared to the others.

•     When talking about intersectionality I think you HAVE to cite Kimberly Crenshaw (1991) and Patricia Hill Collins (2000, 2016). Collins just published a book literally titled Intersectionality

•    The white highlighted words throughout have to go.

•    Again, I think the website format needs work. The sessions could be better organized in a table of some sort. As it stands it is just bleh to me.

•    Could you take one session to do a "Safe Zone" training by change? Just a suggestion.

•    The overall website design really makes it hard for me to follow this at times. I wish there could be tabs of some sort the reader could click to look at different sessions. Tabs that retract and expand would be ideal.

•    Also, are you using APA or MLA? Your in-text are APA, but you have Works Cited at the end, it should be References if using APA. Fix this.

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Students’ Responses:

Response to Evaluation #1:

Our first respondent provided very useful feedback and suggestions that would help guide us in shaping, defining, and implementing our program at Ball State University. The respondent provided very encouraging feedback and support regarding the content and justification of the program and the degree of detail and research that contributed to our creating our course. This encouragement further supported our enthusiasm for the project and course design and our sense that a program of this nature that supported empowering employees would be of value to Ball State University or any other higher education institution.

The respondent’s constructive criticism will be most useful in helping us hone and fine tune our program, provide more clarity regarding the intended audience, and work with Ball State University to implement the program. Regarding the respondent’s comments on participation, staff, and costs, our group would respond by defining the required participants in the program as faculty, professional staff, and paraprofessional staff. Service staff participation would be optional and could be determined by the supervisor of the service staff unit. This change would be recommended in response to cost considerations as the participation of hourly service staff would likely require overtime payment costs that would not be required of salaried and not hourly employees.  

With regard to concerns about time cost, we would modify the program to take place over 8 weeks in 60-minute sessions rather than 90-minute sessions. We could still cover the topics and execute the daily programs to an appropriate degree of thoroughness and in a meaningful way over 2/3rds of the time. This measure would reduce time cost by 4 hours per employee while not radically impacting the ability to provide a meaningful educational experience.

We would also respond to these comments by writing a justification document and submitting it to the Office of the Provost and Academic Affairs and the Office of Business Affairs at Ball State University to justify the time cost for required participation. This justification document would emphasize that the course content would be designed to improve the quality and effectiveness of the workplace and promote more fulfilling work lives for Ball State University employees. Empowered workforce is an effective and productive workforce.

With regard to the comment concerning the gender and racial makeup of the facilitators, we would recruit graduate students, faculty, staff, and outside educators who we felt provided diverse perspectives to our learners and participants. We would develop a participation stipend to incentivize potential educators to lead our sessions and would develop a recruitment email that highlighted the value and benefits of our educational program and message.

Response to Evaluation #2:

Respondent #2 provided our group with a very extensive list of suggestions.  While his list was long, it was thorough; this, we appreciated. The length of his feedback told us that he took the time to comprehensively critique each section. Additionally, this evaluator was well versed in feminist pedagogy and knowledgeable about the “main players” within this discipline. He offered many useful suggestions for authors whose work would add great insight to our program. He firmly stressed the importance of having current citations. We agree with his suggestion. Current information is always beneficial. This respondent also made the same suggestion as our first respondent: change the 90-minute sessions to 60-minutes. Apparently, there is a consensus. Ninety-minute classes are too much of a time commitment and costly. Sixty-minute classes for 8-weeks would suffice (the change has already been mentioned in the previous response to #1).  As stated previously, this measure would reduce time cost by 4 hours per employee while not radically impacting the ability to provide a meaningful educational experience.

Respondent #2 seemed perturbed with the appearance of our program design. Perhaps if we had explained the required method of our class in terms of presentation and submission to our blog prior to his evaluation, he may have been less preoccupied with the design aesthetics; however, this was unforeseen. That being said, his suggestions of changing the color scheme and function do ward some merit. For example, we hope to evoke at least some enthusiasm of our design from actual participants. When folks leaf through the design prior to “class”, we want it to be aesthetically pleasing to the eye; we want it to grab their attention. The actual advertising of this program would take place on Ball State’s Human Resource Department’s website. By doing this, we wouldn’t need to add tabs, as respondent #2 suggested. This fact of advertising on BSU’s website was not mentioned in our original class assignment, but after experiencing this evaluation process and reviewing all of the feedback, we feel it should be added.  Furthermore, Ball State’s HR department website is itself aesthetically pleasing.

Next we will address the respondent’s suggestions for authors to incorporate into our program design. First, he suggested to use more current citations and offered some current authors to pull from - i.e. Patricia Leavy, Patricia Hill Collins, Radhika Gajjala, Sandra Faulkner, Arthur P. Bochner, etc. As stated earlier, this suggestion makes sense. He did encourage us to keep the 1997 citation but add another more current quote. Patricia Hill Collins has done extensive research on intersectionality. Her work could be utilized in our “Acknowledging Intersectionality” section of our design, i.e. Collins on intersectionality in 2000: “Intersectionality refers to particular forms of intersecting oppressions, for example, intersections of race and gender, or of sexuality and nation. Intersectional paradigms remind us that oppression cannot be reduced to one fundamental type, and that oppressions work together in producing injustice.”  Kimberly Crenshaw’s writing would be useful also.   

Additionally, the respondent’s suggestion on using the Society of Human Resource Management website was smart.  This website offers very informative literature.  If more time was allotted, we would explore, for example, Leavy’s comprehensive and interdisciplinary text Feminism Theory and Pop Culture which synthesizes feminist theory with modern portrayals of gender in media culture as well.   

Respondent #2 also advised us to place all sessions in individual tables.  This could easily be formatted and could make it easy to follow if we use different colors for each subsequent session.  For example:

Session #1
Activity Title 1	Introduction
Activity Description 1	The instructor briefly introduces the purpose of the course and the goals of the course as outlined above.  The instructor emphasizes the value of a democratic classroom and encourages all participants to speak up, contest ideas, and take ownership over the educational space. For an introduction, each participant is asked to introduce themselves, discuss their role/job at the university, and describe one or two opportunities that they have in their job to interact with others (students, colleagues, community members). By articulating and understanding these connections, the participants will be encouraged to think of these connections as opportunities to share empowerment.
Activity Title 2	Challenging Assumed Ideas in the Workplace Activity
Activity Description 2	Participants are asked to think back to a previous job (or class, or organization they were involved in, etc.) and identify a piece of knowledge that they thought was unjust, unfair, or ineffective. This piece of knowledge could be a policy or rule, a shared assumption, a decision, etc.  The participants, on worksheets, will describe · The piece of knowledge  (policy/rule/assumption/decision) ·  Their thoughts why the knowledge was unjust or unfair ·  Why they felt the knowledge was prevalent in the particular organization ·  What group of people in the organization  helped propel and sustain this knowledge? In small groups, the participants will discuss with one another what they wrote down.  As a group, they will make a list of 3 or 4 prominent ways in which organizations tend to sustain unjust knowledge and discuss these findings with the entire class.
Related Components of Feminist Pedagogy	Reconsidering Authority, Challenging the Construction of Knowledge, Using Engaged Teaching to Transform, Human Resource Development

Respondent #2’s suggestion about Safe Zone training session is an excellent idea.  Safe Zone is a great program!  It is established and has some specific aims and content that it provides in a standard way across various colleges and workplaces.  Ball State already conducts Safe Zone training sessions each semester.  We feel that the best way to incorporate this training into our program would be to encourage participants to sign up for it through the university. To try and incorporate it into our program might be redundant, though we could use our program as a nice plug for this program and even have one of the people who run the training attend a session to briefly explain the purpose and benefits of Safe Zone training.

Finally, the last suggestion we will address is that of Emotion Literature.  It was stated that this section of our design was less-developed than the rest.  We feel that our Program Design has a strong theoretical foundation already; to add more at this point may be superfluous and unnecessary.  Nevertheless, Marti Cleveland-Innes and Prisca Campbell (2012) offer relevant scholarship in their article titled “Emotional Presence, Learning, and the Online Learning Environment”. Also Brad Shuck, Carlos Albornoz, and Marina Winberg (2007) from the Florida International University can be cited: “Emotions and Their Effect on Adult Learning: A Constructivist Perspective”.

Group Reflection:

One thing we would like to highlight about our project is the way it spans so many disciplines in terms of theory. Feminist theorists work within many disciplines, such as Rhetoric and Composition (in English), Communications studies, Education, Philosophy, and so on. Thus, a program that focuses on feminist teaching can pull scholarship from a plethora of journals and fields. This is both a strength and a challenge. We tried to pull from scholars with a variety of backgrounds and research interests to demonstrate the complexity of feminism, but we also want a sense of cohesion across the theories. The ways feminist teaching gets taken up into practice is very diverse but we want our program to provide consistency for participants. Thus, we have made a conscience effort to represent a variety of scholars in our program rationale and to incorporate many topics in our workshops.

Another aspect we would like to highlight about our program is the positive response we have received from those who have reviewed it. Both evaluators commented on the exigency for this kind of program, which we feel highlights the real need for more feminist teaching and learning. Universities are an excellent place to begin the work of dismantling oppressive institutions, practices, and behaviors. Our evaluators agreed with the important work that our program hopes to do.

We completed this project by first considering who would have the most expertise on the topics of our program design. We wanted to seek input from professionals connected with the human resources part of the university or who had expertise on feminist teaching and learning. We decided to email several professionals who are connected with Ball State  University’s Human Resources Department. After receiving feedback from one of those professionals, we decided to request feedback from professionals who openly discuss their experiences living as a member of a minority group within academia. We reached out to instructors we have met in person. It was helpful to include a time frame for the evaluators so they knew what we expected and to ensure that we had enough time to take the next step in the project.

One challenge of this assignment for us was to get responses from professionals who might have a lot of expertise on our subject. We wanted to make sure they had enough time to look over the program and respond but we also needed to ensure that we had enough time to think through their feedback and revise our program design. What we found helpful was to ask more people for feedback than the number of evaluations we actually needed since we knew some of them would not reply or would not have time. It would probably have been easier to get feedback from people we saw in person rather than through an e-mail as many emails can get overlooked. We were most disheartened by the fact that though we asked five scholars, we only received feedback from two.  As much as we respectfully reminded people, we could not evoke interest or enforce follow-through.

One thing we took away from this project was learning how to work with “outside people”.  Patience is a virtue that oftentimes is elusive, especially when there is a deadline fast approaching.  It seemed somewhat challenging to rely on outside help for the success of our project while waiting patiently for a response that wasn’t coming. Luckily, we were able to obtain a second evaluator at the last minute who was still qualified and well-versed in feminist learning.

Our suggestions for future students would be to start inquiring sooner than anticipated and to ask more professionals for feedback than necessary. Email proved to be a successful communication tool for us once more. We also found Google Docs to be useful and efficient in constructing our project.

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Table 4. Summary of Program Evaluation

Evaluators	Ideas for Improving program design	Revisions/Your responses
# 1: Learning and development/human resources educator at research university in midwestern United States.	1.) Consider whether or not the program is required. If required, need to get approval from university administrative offices. 2.) Consider the cost of this program for the university because required training means the university must pay the hourly wage for participants. 3.) Make clear who is participating by defining what is meant by “staff” in current program design. 4.) Eight 90 minute sessions is a large commitment. 5.) Use multiple presenters, representing various gender identities and racial backgrounds. The presenters’ information be included in the program to show diversity.	1. & 2.) Submit justification document to the Office of the Provost and Academic Affairs and the Office of Business Affairs at Ball State University to justify the time cost for required participation. 3.) Required participants in the program defined as faculty, professional staff, and paraprofessional staff.  Service staff participation would be optional and could be determined by the supervisor of the service staff unit. 4.) Modify the program to take place over 8 weeks in 60-minute sessions rather than 90-minute sessions. 5.) Recruit diverse session leaders by providing stipend and creating a recruitment email highlighting the value of the program.
#2  Graduate Student Trustee, Board of Trustees Doctoral Student & Instructor Graduate Teaching Assistant School of Media & Communication in midwestern United States	1.) Rethink color scheme and the design 2.) Leave off roles and ‘commented on’ section; use name followed by degrees/education/research interests/contact information. This establishes ethos. 3.) Reduce 90 min./wk to 60 min/wk over 8 weeks OR 90 min. every other week over 16 weeks. 4.) The 1997 citation is dated, keep citation, but find current literature.   5.)  Pull citations from SHRM's (Society of Human Resource Management) website 6.) Deanna Fassett and John T. Warren, (2003) book on Critical Pedagogy; may be useful with project. 7.) For the emotion literature, need more current info., communication literature (see, S. J. Tracy, S. Planalp, K. Miller, Vincent Waldron, etc.) build on that section; it is short compared to others. 8.) When talking about intersectionality I think you HAVE to cite Kimberly Crenshaw (1991) and Patricia Hill Collins (2000, 2016). 9.) The sessions could be better organized in a table of some sort. As it stands it is just bleh to me. 10.) Could you take one session to do a "Safe Zone" training by change? Just a suggestion. 11. The overall website design really makes it hard for me to follow this at times. I wish there could be tabs of some sort the reader could click to look at different sessions. Tabs that retract and expand would be ideal. 12.) Your in-text are APA, but you have Works Cited at the end, it should be References if using APA. Fix this.	1.) Respondent is unaware of blog intention; color can be added to the “session tables”; we want program to look aesthetically pleasing; it will be advertised on BSU website. 2.) Respondent is unaware of blog intention; his suggestion makes sense, but these cannot be implemented. 3.) Reduce class time to 60 min/weekly. 4.) Keep 1997 citation and add more current info. as well; pull from P. Hill Collins. 5.) can use one or two articles from SHRM website. 6.) Good info., but no time to access the book. 7.) add info. from a few more articles but we feel strong w/ development of theory. 8.) Adding quote from Collins and Crenshaw. 9.) Create colorful tables for each session in MSW. 10.) Encourage participants to sign up for BSU’s Safe Zone training; will not add it to our program. 11.) Respondent is unaware of blog intention; program will be advertised on BSU website on the HR webpage; very aesthetically pleasing; we like his suggestions however; could add tabs but need assistance from T-Com dep’t. 12.) Erase the words “Works Cited”, instead add “References”.