[hr-education] Re: Research and evaluation on impact of HRE

Dear Colleagues

A few more thoughts on evaluation, rather late in the day. I think we need
to draw a distinction between, on the one hand, evaluating our own
programmes, and on the other ­ 'evaluating' HRE as a whole. The first of
these tasks is clearly important (though of course very difficult to do
effectively). The second, I think, is unnecessary, and probably also
impossible to carry out.

This message does not deal with the first task ­ except to say that the
practitioners who have written in are surely right that there is a great
deal to be done, so we need to be sure that energies ­ and finance - put
into evaluation and research will not only not get in the way of practical
work, but will actually make it more effective, move it forward. (Otherwise
I, for one, would rather have those energies and that finance for the
practical work!)

So - back to the second task. How might evaluation of HRE as a whole move
us forward? One idea that emerges from some of the messages is that we need
to be able to persuade outsiders - including governments and maybe also
funders - about the value of HRE. We need to be able to show them (and
ourselves?) what HRE can do, by appealing to concrete results. Mike
Dottridge, in his message, seems to go even further. He implies that HRE
practitioners need to prove to the outside world that they are not just
engaged in a futile exercise: we should undertake a wholesale evaluation of
our work, incorporating concrete results in the field.

My main objection to this lies in the enormity and impracticality of such a
task. But I also want to say that I don't think we need to feel that we, as
a community, are bound to tackle it (together) in this way. I simply do not
think it is the most effective way of justifying what we are doing. (Nor,
in fact, do I believe it is the most effective way of evaluating what we
are doing).

Imagine, for a moment, that the whole curriculum was up for grabs, and that
teachers of geography, maths, history, music, sport and law, as well as
those of human rights, were required to justify their places in a new
curriculum. Not just individual music teachers in individual schools, nor
teachers in just one country, but all music teachers in the world were now
expected to come together and make a common justification based on common
'results' in the field of musical education.

What on earth should they point to?

-	The number of famous composers?
-	The number of folk groups playing, on average, every evening?
-	Musical instruments purchased by individual households?
-	Original interpretations of the classics?
-	Demand for places studying at music colleges?
-	Demand for concerts to be publicly funded?
-	New drum beat rhythms?

Or perhaps the studies would try to take into account more general factors
­ such as the extent to which musical education has influenced creativity
in other fields, has led to a reduction in anti-social behaviour, or to a
raising of the spirits in the population as a whole. We could measure the
average number of hours spent whistling in the street or singing in the bath…

Silly examples, perhaps. But it is equally silly, I think, to imagine that
we as a community of educators ought to be able to come up with such a list
of measurable criteria for HRE, given the different ways in which we are
all working, the different groups and individuals with whom we are working,
and the very different societies and cultures in which we are working. The
one thing on which we all agree, is that we want our work to reduce the
violations of human rights in the world. But as others have pointed out in
this forum - that will only begin to be clear (if at all) when the
generation we are teaching have lived out their lives. After all - one
little slip at the age of 89 from one of our former pupils could provide a
wholly different picture.

We would never demand that all music teachers in the world carry out a
general evaluation of 'musical education'. They might be asked individually
to justify the methods or programme they were using, or the goals that they
had set, or whether those goals might be expected to emerge from the
methods being employed (and that would be quite right, and very important).
But would we hope to find a common 'impact' of musical education in, for
example, Germany, Brazil, Poland and Zaire? Would it be at all relevant to
measure the impact in these different countries by the very same criteria?

(Perhaps I am ill-informed, and perhaps educationalists do engage in such
comparative studies ­ but my point really is that they did not do it from
the beginning, and they do not do it in order to justify musical education.
The justification lies elsewhere)

Why then do people demand a meta-justification from the community of HR
educators? Why are we required to justify what we are doing at a
philosophical level, while other subjects can point to short-term results,
and to mere indications of future 'success'? Even the very closely related
subject of education for citizenship is rarely asked to justify its
existence at such a fundamental level. But there is no more 'proof' that
citizenship education produces Good Citizens, than there is that HRE
produces Non-Violators of human rights.

Some final brief points, by way of summing up.

Firstly - there are probably at least as many different ways of engaging in
HRE as there are of 'teaching music'. Some of these ways may be more
relevant than others under different cultural conditions, or at different
points in history, or depending on the different goals that different
teachers set themselves. All may be worthwhile in their own way. I cannot
see that it is particularly helpful, for the purpose of analysis, to group
them all together. We are a diverse bunch.

Secondly ­ just as there are better and worse teachers of music, or
approaches to teaching music, so, most probably, will there be better and
worse approaches to HRE. Some approaches may even be wholly ineffective.
Where we can compare like with like, we should of course try to do so,
because that will help us to improve our own work. But let us not try to
preserve a united front just for the sake of it, and claim the successes or
failures of other wholly different HRE programmes as 'ours' as a community.
After all - we would not dream of comparing a study of the Goldberg
Variations with playing the gamelan; and nor would we regard a failure in
one as a failure for 'musical education' per se.

Finally ­ we can take up the challenge that HRE has not yet proved to all
the sceptics that it is necessary. But we should take it up in the same way
that, for example, citizenship education has done so - by appealing to
basic assumptions about the way that the mental and emotional world of
human beings develops, of how they come to value certain things above
others, and how experience and practice helps them to improve the way they
influence and interact with the world around them.

A theme for another discussion, maybe.

Ellie

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