Chapter 3: Cultural Views of Validity: A Conversation

Collaboration among the coauthors of this chapter began in 2004 when Karen Kirkhart was invited to serve as a consultant to a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC). The grant supported the development of an Indigenous Evaluation Framework (IEF) by Joan LaFrance and Richard Nichols.² At the beginning of the project to develop the IEF, the NSF recommended that AIHEC engage an evaluation theorist with the suggestion that it would be useful to the evaluation profession to understand how an Indigenous perspective contributes to Western evaluation theory. Over the years, the authors have engaged in conversations about ways in which culture itself, and an Indigenous cultural lens in particular, influences views on evaluation theory.