Evaluating Projects
Anyone who works in film education will know the pressure to produce an ‘evaluation’, immediately the project is over, and often in order to unlock a final tranche of funding.
Anyone who works in film education will know the pressure to produce an ‘evaluation’, immediately the project is over, and often in order to unlock a final tranche of funding.
The pressures can lead to a distortion of the project: we want positive, and measurable outcomes; those outcomes have to be immediately visible, and visible in individual participants; and they usually have to relate to the ‘projected outcomes’ in the bid we wrote to gain the funding, making it difficult to report the unexpected, the enigmatic, or unexplained consequences that often occur
Here is a second piece by Cary Bazalgette, Teachers & Media professionals - An Equal Relationship?. The short article reports on her experience of evaluating media and film education projects, and the pitfalls she encountered. The apparent focus of the piece is on how media professionals and educators work together on projects, but along the way, she notices significant limitations to short term evaluation, and maybe to projects themselves.
In some ways, education projects are the opposite of the ambitions we should have for film education: where projects are short term, with limited impacts, the school curriculum is implemented for years at a time (also making it slow to change), reaches every child, and is massively resourced. Bazalgette says a problem often cited in project work is ‘not enough time, and not enough money’. The answer may be not ‘more time, and more money’, but to unlock that time and money by putting film in what have been called ‘high stakes places’: mother tongue literacy, ICT, and Science Technology Engineering and Maths.