Chapter 9: It Starts with a Machete: The Politics and Poetics of Space in Urban School Reform

This chapter embraces poetic language to irritate and stimulate a questioning of a modernist evaluation project invested in a positivist paradigm, a project that embraces the possibility of neutral and objective knowledge devoid of power. Concerned with how to conduct a culturally responsive evaluation of our collective work in radical urban school reform, here we follow Frierson, Hood, and Hughes (2002) and explore new ways to illuminate the culture of the program context and the culture of the participants. As with Susan Krieger (1991), the science we speak from is “not hard, objective, standard, dispassionate, nor is it about measurement, data, clear-cut models of behavior, or procedures for testing. It is soft, subjective, idiosyncratic, ambivalent, conflicted, about the inner life, and about experiences that cannot be measured, tested, or fully shared” (p. 2). This is evaluation research that seeks “other” ways of knowing. Following Miron (2003), we move toward the aesthetic in educational research, toward ways of knowing that may better illuminate the cultural facets of radical education reform.