In one of my projects with the Maine Humanities Council, we used poetry (Adrienne Rich’s “In Those Years”) to help people think together about how to create “the communities we wish to live in.” One core value we all held was full participation: We agreed that we wanted to get more and different people to “the table.” But when we dug into what that really meant, things got more complicated, and we realized that many of us saw particular aspects of full
participation differently. Some of us asked whose table we were talking about, and where it was located, and who felt comfortable there. Should we consider holding a session at Walmart? At a hockey game? Some of us found this amusing, and some agreed that these suggestions might be highly effective in engaging a wider range of participants. But it was deemed impractical — we did not have the staff, relationships, or funding to host more of these sessions in multiple locations — and that value won out. We did what we could comfortably do to make the event accessible, holding it at the public library, during evening hours that did not conflict with key community events. And that decision took us right back to the assumptions we each held related to full participation — some of us believed that topic of conversation, at that place and time, was a luxury of the more educated and affluent
population who were the “usual suspects” of the MHC. The fact that we took a co-creative approach (all these decisions were made at the community level by collaborative groups of community partners, MHC scholars, and occasionally staff) meant that we did achieve a certain kind of full participation, in that everyone who wanted to come, who knew about it, was enabled to do so by childcare support and transportation assistance. But we also acknowledged that knowing about it and wanting to come and being able to come are themselves pretty exclusive qualifiers. Ultimately, our assessment process documented total number of participants and also determined how many were new to MHC programs; so we counted the things we cared about — using newness as a stand-in for more full participation — but failed, as so many of us do, to figure out how to balance practicability with our desire to reach new and different groups of participants.
In summary, we recognize that these values and their definitions will have varying degrees of resonance depending on context. Time, place, social setting, and the underlying philosophies we bring to our work and inquiry are of particular significance here. Indeed, the broader liberatory ends of democracy and justice, at the heart of living out DEA, are best served not through calls to absolutist views of morality, but through grounded practices of deliberation about democratic values and their use. Absolutist
approaches can lead us to reify values — to make them unquestionable facts or to reduce them to a set of checkboxes. We see such an approach as counterproductive to enacting assessment as holistic knowledge making, democratic culture building, and public problem solving.
The democratic values listed here should thus be considered as points of departure for those initiating discussions about the characteristics of and rationale for democratic engagement and assessments. We believe they can help us discover, or perhaps rekindle, the hope and possibility inherent in assessment as a form of collective inquiry, inquiry that unlocks the civic imagination. When we name agency, aspiration, and authenticity as important concerns, we can craft assessment to hold ourselves
accountable. Do our processes include time to cultivate relationships and connect to our values? Do they help to name and refine the many kinds of aspirations — for community empowerment or for social change, for example — that drive our partnerships? In short, do our assessment practices help us
understand the integrity — and lack thereof — not only of our assessment outcomes but also of our practice? These are powerful possibilities, but we know they are challenging to actualize. Part II offers some steps in this direction.
Point of Inquiry
Most of us function in contexts where we know who participates and what perspectives we think matter. But those assumptions can trip us up, as Anna’s story illustrates. Adrienne Rich’s (1971/2013) poem, “In Those Years,” which we excerpt here, offers us another way to think about this:
In those years, people will say, we lost track of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves reduced to I
...
we were trying to live a personal life ...
But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove along the shore, through the rags of fog
where we stood, saying I
Consider your standard assessment practices; what are the “great dark birds of history” that overshadow what you do? Where might you be losing track of the “meaning of we”?