Do you share our interest in inquiry processes related to human and natural systems to support a sustainable, equitable future?
We’re eager to build connections through networks, communities of practice, and other associations. Join us in encouraging visionary evaluation, research, planning, development, and design to support innovation at the intersection of formal and informal social and natural systems.
InSites core staff and consultants are actively involved in a variety of networks. Such involvement helps insure high quality work and provides us with a means of sharing our learning with others. Our goal is to use as any avenues as possible to promote inquiry and learning in support of a sustainable, equitable future for all. We are especially involved in the American Evaluation Association and several of its Topical Interest Groups. We are also involved in the Environmental Evaluators Network, the American Educational Research Association. Through these networks, we are able to draw on other highly qualified people to participate in consultations and projects that we undertake.
Through these networks we have also been able to share our learning through presentations and seminars for groups involved in these networks.
InSites emphasizes evaluation capacity building throughout its work. InSites especially encourages and supports Communities of Practice that build evaluation capacity. Communities of Practice are small groups of people who engage with one another over a specified period of time focused on a particular challenge or issue. InSites has had two National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to use a Community of Practice approach to building evaluation capacity. CLIPs (Communities of Learning, Inquiry, and Practice) built capacity among higher education faculty. ECLIPS (Evaluation Communities of Learning, Inquiry, and Practice about Systems) built the capacity of experienced evaluators of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education projects to use a systems-orientation in their evaluation.
InSites engages in other forms of evaluation capacity building through the development of resource materials and guides that can be used to support high quality evaluation, research, planning and learning. We are currently developing materials about systems-oriented evaluation, how evaluation can support a sustainable, equitable future for all through arrangements with several foundations and publishers.