The conference will feature a keynote presentation by Dr. Stafford Hood titled, The Journey of One Aspiring Culturally Responsive Evaluator and Lessons Learned Along the Way: A Welcomed Return to New Mexico. The conference will also feature a series of sessions related to Social Justice and Evaluation:
- Claudia Isaac, PhD will present Participatory Empowerment Evaluation
- Kathy Isaacson, PhD will present Facilitating Management of Difference: Principles, Methods, Practice
- Jessica Goodkind, PhD; Martin Ndayisenga, BSW; and Mahbooba Pannah will present Evaluating Multi-level Social Justice Interventions: Challenges, Lessons, and Innovations from the Refugee Well-being Project
- Nancy López, PhD; Christopher Erwin, MA; Melissa Binder, PhD; and Mario Chavez, MA will present Developing your "Intersectionality Lens" for Serving Vulnerable Communities: Race-Gender-Class Gaps at a Public University in the Southwest 1980-2015
Register soon as space is limited! Deadline to register is September 4th.
Meet the Presenters Reception
We will be hosting a special reception on the rooftop of the beautiful Hotel Parq Central the evening before the conference to allow attendees to get to know the presenters, including our keynote presenter, Dr. Stafford Hood.
Hotel Accommodations
Conference attendees can stay at the Hotel Parq Central for $128/night. All Hotel Parq Central guest room rates include a complimentary upscale continental breakfast, shuttle transportation to and from the airport and within a 3-mile radius, on-site parking and complimentary internet access. Go to Parq Central NM Evaluators Conference Rate.pdf for details.
Student Poster Session
Students are eligible to submit new or previously presented posters during the conference's student poster session to be held after lunch on the day of the conference. If you would like to present a poster, you will be asked for a title (or tentative title) during registration.
Sponsors
We thank our generous sponsors for helping to make the conference possible.
About the Presenters
Dr. Stafford Hood
Stafford Hood is the Sheila M. Miller Professor of Education and Founding Director of the Center for Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment (http://crea.education.illinois.edu) in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he also holds appointments as Professor of Curriculum & Instruction and Educational Psychology. He has also served as the Associate Dean for Research and Research Education in the College of Education and Head of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. Previously he served as Associate Dean for Research and Professor of Psychology in Education in the College of Education at Arizona State University.
Hood's recent scholarly publications have primarily focused on culturally responsive evaluation, African American evaluators during the Pre-Brown v. Board of Education period, and the importance of culture/cultural context in program evaluation. He has served as a program evaluation and testing consultant to the federal government, state governments, local school districts, universities, and private foundations as well as internationally in New Zealand and Ireland. He was inducted as a 2016 Fellow of the American Educational Research Association, received the American Evaluation Association’s 2015 Paul F. Lazarsfeld Evaluation Theory Award and in 2014 an honorary appointment as Adjunct Professor in the School of Education Studies at Dublin City University (Dublin Ireland).
Dr. Claudia Isaac
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Claudia Isaac, Associate Professor at the University of New Mexico (UNM), is a founding member of the NMResiliency Alliance (NMRA) and currently serves as the Board Vice President. Her work with the NMRA aligns with her research, practice and teaching in community-based economic development and community-based organization development. She is committed to asset-based economic development, particularly in rural and underserved communities, and conducts participatory evaluation, affordable housing research and planning, gender planning, and identity planning to advance that work. She also teaches qualitative and decolonizing methodologies and Latin American development planning. She works with community-based organizations in New Mexico, particularly those involved in housing, food security, and asset-based community economic development. She is the recipient of the 2nd Annual UNM Community Engaged Research award in 2017.
Dr. Jessica Goodkind
Jessica Goodkind is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico and Co-Director of the Cultural Competency Curriculum for the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center. She works collaboratively with communities to understand and address the mental health consequences of exposure to highly stressful social environments and to develop and assess processes that promote healing, well-being, and social justice. She is the founder and director of the Refugee Well-being Project, which started in 2000 and brings together university students and newly resettled refugee families to learn from each other and engage in collaborative efforts to mobilize resources, with the long-term goals of improving refugee mental health and creating sustainable changes in communities’ receptiveness to refugees and policies that affect refugee resettlement.
Martin Ndayisenga
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Martin Ndayisenga has a B.S.W. and serves as the refugee delegate for New Mexico to the United Nations Refugee Congress. He is currently the secretary for the Association of Burundian Americans in New Mexico and is an interpreter and researcher with the Refugee Well-being Project (after his family participated in the RWP in 2007-2008). Martin came to the United States as a refugee in 2007 and is originally from Burundi. He is fluent in Kirundi/Kinyarwanda, Swahili, French, and English.
Mahbooba Pannah
Mahbooba Pannah is originally from Afghanistan and is fluent in Dari and English. She has been involved with the Afghan community in New Mexico for over 15 years, including providing interpretation and community navigation. She began working with the Refugee Well-being Project in 2015 as an interpreter, but soon expanded her role to include conducting research. Mahbooba is also the vice president of the Afghan Society of New Mexico and a community organizer with Asian Family Center.
Dr. Kathy Isaacson
Kathy Isaacson is on the faculty at the University of New Mexico in the communication department and is the founder and president of Strategic Engagement, a communication consulting organization. She serves as a strategic planning and transformational change specialist, mediator, facilitator, and trainer. She works with groups and individuals, organizations, institutions, leaders, governments, and industries in the United States and abroad. Isaacson helped to establish the Prosperity Game methodology by designing, directing, and facilitating high-level strategy and leadership games for such clients as the White House Initiative on TCU’s, Eastman Kodak, The President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure, Sandia National Laboratories, Lockheed Martin, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. She was a member of the President's Board of Advisers to the White House Initiative on Tribal Colleges and Universities under both the Bush and Obama administrations. Isaacson is the author four books and numerous articles and videos. She received her PhD in communication and social change from Tilburg University in the Netherlands.
Dr. Nancy Lopez
Nancy López is associate professor of sociology at the University of New Mexico and directs and co-founded the Institute for the Study of "Race" and Social Justice, RWJF Center for Health Policy. She is the founding coordinator of the New Mexico Statewide Race, Gender, Class Data Policy Consortium. Dr. López also served as the inaugural co-chair of the Diversity Council and serves on Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee, UNM. Dr. López chairs the committee on the status of Racial and Ethnic Minorities and was past-chair of the Race, Gender, Class Section of the American Sociological Association.
López's scholarship, teaching and service is guided by the insights of intersectionality --the importance of examining race, gender, class, ethnicity together--for interrogating inequalities across a variety of social outcomes, including education, health, employment, housing, and developing contextualized solutions that advance social justice. Her book, Hopeful Girls, Troubled Boys: Race and Gender Disparity in Urban Education (Routledge, 2003) focuses on the race-gender experiences of Dominicans, West Indians, and Haitians to explain why girls are succeeding at higher rates than boys. Dr. López co-edited, Mapping "Race": Critical Approaches to Health Disparities Research (Rutgers, 2013), a multidisciplinary volume that was the byproduct of National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded workshop. The book departs from the premise that “race” is a multidimensional and multilevel social construction that has profound methodological implications for research and policy. Her current work includes a national representative survey of Latinos to examines the health outcomes of Latino immigrants by examining a new measure of racialization she calls "street race" and "street race-gender." Another project involves examining interdisciplinary ontologies of race via a critical race theory content analysis of official documents of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Census, scholarly associations and the Supreme Court as sites of racial formation; she cautions that current proposals to combine two analytically distinct concepts, Hispanic origin and race, into one question for the 2020 Census may undermine civil rights monitoring and enforcement. Dr. López argues data collection should be anchored in ethical accuracy for social justice rather than aesthetic superficial decontextualized accuracy for compliance only. Dr. López is completing demographic profiles of New Mexico that examines trends in race-gender-class gaps in income, employment and wealth as well as the impact of school-level resources on college graduation at a large public university in the Southwest. Dr. Lopez is collaborating with the AfroLatin@ Forum in New York City to conduct a study of AfroLatin@s in NYC. In Albuquerque, Dr. López is founding principal investigator for an interdisciplinary team of scholars at the University of New Mexico and public school district, school level administrators and teachers on examining the impact of Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) and the implementation of liberatory curriculum and pedagogy in a large public school district in New Mexico through the Ethnic Studies Education and Health (ESEH) Research Practice Partnership (RPP) for Empowerment and Equity in P-20 schools and universities.
Dr. López has taught for over two decades in a variety of public universities (City University of New York, University of Massachusetts and University of New Mexico), that serve a very diverse group of students, including those who like Dr. López, were the first in their families to complete high school and pursue higher education. Dr. López has chaired or served as a member of over 30 doctoral degree committees and 20 masters degree committees. Dr. López has received several awards recognizing her contributions to mentoring, teaching, service and research, including the Gunter Starkey Teaching Award, Presidential Luminaria Award and the Inaugural Academic Leadership Academy Fellowship, of the Division of Equity and Inclusion, UNM. Dr. López is the first woman of color tenured in the Sociology department and the first woman the African Diaspora (AfroLatina) tenured in the College of Arts and Sciences at UNM.
The daughter of Dominican immigrants who were only able to attend primary school through the second grade, Dr. López was born in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and she was raised in Baruch Public Houses. Spanish is her first language. In 1987 Dr. López graduated from Washington Irving H.S., a de facto racially segregated large public vocational high school for girls.
Christopher Erwin
Christopher Erwin is a Doctoral Candidate in Economics at the University of New Mexico. Erwin's research interests include the effects of merit-based scholarships on outcomes in higher education; lengthening time to degree in the United States; quantitative methods in studies of intersectionality; impacts of immigrant flows on employment and wages; and whether high undergraduate debt burden leads to skill mismatch in the labor market.
