Guest Editors’ notes

Abstract

This volume has been in development since November 2019, when between AEA2019 sessions Guest Editor John LaVelle posed writing a New Directions for Evaluation on evaluator education to the NDE Editors, and received a supportive nod to move forward with developing a proposal. Following that hallway discussion, he reached out to some of the many people in evaluation that he admired; colleagues that could complement his strengths, offset his limitations, provide checks and balances to his vision, and make the project better through their contributions and critiques. Leah C. Neubauer, Ayesha S. Boyce, and Tom Archibald agreed to collaborate on the project. This group, the self-titled “Dream Team” (Leah reminded us of that name’s origins, the 1992 USA men’s Olympic basketball team) united around the ethos of creating an intentional space for contributors that had often not been included in discussions about evaluator education, and asking them to imagine a better future for evaluator education than we had experienced ourselves. Like any major project, there have been adventures and challenges along the way. Conceptually, we were critiqued for being a volume led solely by faculty in university settings, not being radical enough in our vision, and the accelerated timelines for submitting proposals to us for review (see Neubauer et al., 2023 ). Procedurally, when we received over forty proposals for consideration, we proposed editing two NDE volumes to incorporate as many voices as possible; when told that was not an option, we had to find ways to pare down the number of chapters while still maximizing voices in the conversation. Individually and collectively, this meant us giving up including individual chapters that addressed topics we are passionate about and find value in discussing, including chapters that we wanted to write ourselves. Humanistically, we had to find ways to recognize and support the individual and group needs of over 50 individual contributors from across the world, inclusive of scheduling and timeline challenges, writing styles, individual visions for chapters, paradigmatic and disciplinary idiosyncrasies, cultural and pan-national positionalities, and a range of experiences publishing in peer-reviewed and peer-edited outlets. All of this occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. Upon reflection, we think these sorts of challenges are probably the rule rather than the exception. As we look at our processes, products, and connections our contributors have created, we have no regrets about the decisions we made.