Evaluation and Reconciliation Education from a Social Innovation Lens: A Case Study of the Haida Gwaii Institute’s Reconciliation Studies Semester

• Main Author: Cloutis, Geneva Athena
• Format: Master Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: University of Waterloo 2020
• Subjects: program evaluation; social innovation; Haida Gwaii; cross-cultural education; British Columbia; Canada; haida
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10012/15777

In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada released a report highlighting the impacts of residential schools on Indigenous people, and presented Calls to Action to redress this legacy and move forward on a path of reconciliation. Two years later, in 2017, the Haida Gwaii Institute (HGI) launched the Haida Gwaii Semester in Reconciliation Studies. Since 2010, the HGI has been offering educational programming on Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Haida Nation. This research is the result of a three year partnership with the HGI as they piloted and evaluated the Reconciliation Studies Semester (RSS). This work has been guided by the tenets of community-based participatory research (CBPR), which prioritizes relationships as the basis for meaningful research between communities and researchers (Leeuw, Cameron, & Greenwood, 2012). My relationship with the HGI has been fundamental in exploring the RSS and evaluating its strengths and challenges. In this work, the HGI expressed a desire to evaluate the RSS based on the challenges encountered during the program pilot that were not predicted when the program was developed in 2015. I sought to explore the application of social innovation tools for the purposes of program evaluation through document reviews, discussions, participant observation, and five separate visits to Haida Gwaii. I first developed a conceptual framework of best practice, which can theoretically be applied to any organization undertaking transformative education and program evaluation in cross-cultural, complex environments. This framework was developed by exploring four main bodies of literature: systems change and social innovation, transformative learning, critical Indigenous literature, and program evaluation. This framework was applied to the RSS initially without any context, to strictly compare the program to these best practice criteria. Then, I used a multi-level perspective framework to explore niche, regime, and landscape activities ...