Dr Sarah Oxford and Carmen Schroder attended AES22 in Adelaide. Conference highlights included the plenary presentation by A/Prof Amy Gullickson titled ‘Soul and Maturity: On Being Evaluators’. She used accessible language and slides to convey the complications of being an evaluator. An evaluator’s sense of fairness and equity versus political, social and economic context of evaluations can lead to evaluation anxiety. She posited that a more mature approach to evaluations can stop the cycle of evaluation anxiety.
A further highlight was the panel discussion titled ‘Collaborating with people with lived experience in evaluation’. The discussion challenged the notion of the evaluator as ‘independent objective outsider’. Focusing on the mental health sector, it provided a practical perspective for involving people with lived experience in evaluations.
The honesty and integrity of the panel in sharing their vulnerabilities and learnings was impactful.