Abstract
To talk about constructivist knowing, participatory ethics, and responsive evaluation is to recognize an extended family kinship pattern among the terms. Constructivist, or naturalistic, evaluation is built upon responsive evaluation and the major break it represents between privileged forms of evaluation practice and the more democratic forms first proposed by Robert Stake. No discussion of constructivist inquiry’s models of knowing can proceed very far without both a recognition of the paradigm’s debt to Stake’s responsive evaluation and without a discussion of the ethical “terms of endearment” that make the practice of responsive evaluation possible (Abma & Stake, 2001). By “terms of endearment”, I mean the agreements, negotiated meanings, and taken-for-granted stances of all participants and stakeholders in evaluation approaches which are responsive, inclusive, and authentically participatory. Terms of endearment are those ethical postures which come as givens; they refer to what Peter Reason has often called “a way of being in the world.”
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Lincoln, Y.S. (2003). Constructivist Knowing, Participatory Ethics and Responsive Evaluation: A Model for the 21st Century. In: Kellaghan, T., Stufflebeam, D.L. (eds) International Handbook of Educational Evaluation. Kluwer International Handbooks of Education, vol 9. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0309-4_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0309-4_6
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