Documenting Our Collective History: A Tool-and-Result Methodology for Evaluation

This paper describes a tool-and-result methodological approach to the practice and evaluation of an urban community development and gardening project with homeless youth. Over 9 months, at least 40 homeless children and teenagers were involved in the program, and approximately 15 were core participants. The paper critically examines the role of evaluation and assessment with a transient population and discusses how these methods helped to transform leaving into an opportunity to celebrate Public history. As young people engaged in community development and gardening, the collective history was documented through photographs, video, writings, drawings, and interviews. In this context, the documentation of the collective history served both as an artifact to leave behind and memorabilia to take forward. As youth and adults created the tools of the evaluation simultaneously with the project, the evaluation tools became part of the result. The paper addresses the conceptual and theoretical framework of tool-and-result methodology, its challenge to Western scientific frameworks, and its effectiveness for transforming environments of learning and development and empowering those who transform them. (Author/SLD)