ABSTRACT
The expert-mediated evaluation of change and impact found in the education literature was primarily framed in the structural functionalist conventions of modernity that emerged within education as an emancipatory process of mediated social control in the education project of the twentieth century (Popkewitz 2008). Evaluation in Education is characterised by tensions across empirical analytical, constructivist and socially critical perspectives that have been hotly contested over the years. The emergence of Critical Realism after Bhaskar (2008 [1978]) has latterly come to provide some useful tools for resolving much of the ambivalence in the social sciences of the 1980s and 1990s when appreciative enquiry (Cooperrider and Srivastva 1987) and developmental evaluation (Patton 1994) began to emerge and were applied in the evaluation of schooling, community and development projects. Drawing on the Critical Realism oeuvre, the works of Pawson and Tilley (1997) are notable for signalling the advent of a realist turn in evaluation research that brought some order to a diverse and contested landscape at the close of the twentieth century. Within these emergent trajectories of expansion and realignment, evaluation has primarily
remained the realm of experts who are commonly contracted to mediate the steering and summative evidence demanded by the structural functionalist conventions of state and international environment and sustainability institutions. Quinn Patton vividly illustrates the expert position of the evaluator and the balancing act between working with participants and undertaking assessments for funding agencies by noting:
Indeed, in my own work, I prefer to facilitate the generation of recommendations by my clients and primary users. I rarely formulate independent recommendations. However, in the developmental evaluation process, part of my value to a design team is that I bring a reservoir of knowledge (based on 25 years of practice) about what kinds of things tend to work and where to anticipate problems.
