Chapter 8: Dialogue, Difference, and Care in Responsive Enactments of a Worldbecoming

This journal entry was written almost 20 years ago but it still reflects many of my values and concerns. More knowledgeable perhaps and more experienced conducting evaluations in diverse cultural and educational settings, I am still unsure how best to make use of dialogue in formative, responsive evaluations. Dialogue, to me, best represents the movement, purpose, and ethical values of responsive evaluation, and yet I find myself questioning, not its utility, but its conceptualization. This paper then serves as a turning point in my thinking about the role and meaning of dialogue in evaluation. To do this, I make several conceptual moves. First, I rethink my encounter at the museum not in regards to the success or failure of the dialogical encounter but as an enactment of responsiveness and relational ethics. From an ethics of care perspective, dialogue enables a diverse group of stakeholders “to be recognized as active participants in care” (Visse, Abma, & Widdershoven, 2015, p. 2). Interactions, such as the one recounted at the museum, make visible the way care—care for self, care for others, care for a cause, care for the process, and the like—infiltrates all dialogical events, and, as such, this manifestation needs to be understood and accounted for when seeking to understand and reconceptualize dialogue.