Values

One of the central conclusions I've been reaching through all the interviews I've conducted is: We all have values that play important roles in all our evaluations whether or not we acknowledge them. Perhaps being aware of our own values and the values of others involved in our evaluation experiences could help us use them more wisely or at least know that we're having to deal with ours and theirs one way or another? The following quotes from Sue Gong's manuscript illustrates this from my evaluation life.

DDW’s commitment to family flows through all his papers.  He brings his interviews back to family life as a core value.  This section includes his personal essays on First Memories and this theological foundations for the values he holds most important.  His thoughts on family are filled with deep commitment, puzzlement, quiet tensions, and ongoing connections.

First Memories

Transcriptionist: Marie Stirk

Speaker: David Williams

December 14, 2011

[0:00] DDW: So this is December 14. I'm on a walk with Annie, no not Annie, Ruby. And I'm thinking about my own evaluation life. I'm going to make some notes about that life and some of my first memories of values, what those are and how they came to be values; and then I want to reflect on how I've used those values to make evaluations.

[1:00] So the first one that came to my mind was something even before my own memory, but as a story that my parents tell of me and values I demonstrated that they didn't see in all their children. At least, they didn't ever mention they saw others do this. That was the value of loving my little sister. They said that shortly after she was born, when I was barely two years old and a couple months, the first thing I'd do in the morning when I got up was I would go into my little sister's room, [2:00] and I would climb up as high as I could on the edge of her bassinet, and I would welcome her. And say, what a happy day it was or something. Maybe I would just look at her and talk babble. But I clearly valued my sister. That's a sign of a very deeply held value, or one that I think I should have, which is to love other people, care about other people, honor other people. I don't know whether I was doing all that as a two-year-old, but I think it was [3:00] kind of along the same lines. I certainly wasn't going in and pulling her hair or throwing things on her or whatever, that we sometimes fear older siblings might do with their younger siblings.

I'm seeing that same value demonstrated by the little girl I'm pushing in the stroller right now, Ruby. At first, she was not happy about Annie coming into her world and seeing her parents pay attention to Annie. But now she is happy when she sees that Annie's in the room. And she greets her and wants to pat her head, and treat her with lots of love and respect. [4:00] Much as an almost a year and a half old.

So I'm thinking it's interesting that as a child of two, I had that value naturally. My parents might have taught it to me, but I don't know how much they could teach a two-year-old about that versus how much of it was just there naturally. It's interesting to think about what values we seem to have by nature or from the preexistence or somewhere, but we already have them as children. I could think, well in those first two [5:00] years of life, maybe I saw my parents treating one another and other people with love and respect and kindness and that’s how I learned it. I'm sure that was part of it, but it seems like it must have been much more than just that.

So that same value was reinforced many times throughout my life. I had many opportunities to be told that I should love other people, and many opportunities to either love them and treat them kindly or respectfully or to oppose them. And for the most part, I think I've demonstrated throughout my life [6:00] a general consistency in loving and caring for others. That has been, I'd say, an essential part of who I am. It's certainly what I claim to be as a Christian who's trying to follow Jesus Christ, who taught that we should love our neighbor as ourselves. It certainly was reinforced throughout all my family home evenings, church meetings, was reinforced through Scouts when I was taught to do a good turn daily and to be honest in all my dealings with others, [7:00] and lots of other ways that we are typically taught in the West that we should care for others. That's an important part of being human-- treating others as we'd have them treat us and looking after others as much as we look after our own interests. These have been emphasized over and over throughout my life.

One example that stands out is when I pulled out the neighbor's flowers out of their flowerbed, took them home, and gave them to my parents. I must have been at least six, because we were in Phoenix. I might have been seven or even eight. I don't know how old I was. [8:00] But I pulled them out and I took them home, gave them to my mom, and she wondered where they came from, and I don't know if it was she or my dad took me over to apologize to the neighbors for pulling out their flowers. I remember feeling really bad about that and quite shy about going over and telling them those things. But I think in the process, it was really reinforced that we should treat other people's property with respect, and that's part of treating them with respect. We should do things for them that are uplifting and positive and not destructive, or hurtful in any way.

So I think [9:00] I had lots of lessons like that. I remember the one where I was playing a game with a visiting family's domino set, and I kept one of the dominoes. And they left and went back to California, and I held onto that for awhile, and then I took it to my mother and confessed that I had stolen a domino, and how terrible and awful I felt about it, and I don't know how much of that was because I felt I'd done damage to those people or violated their trust, or how much of it was that I had developed a sort of sense of duty. You don't steal things from other people.

Somewhere in there I developed that sense, kind of separate from my love and respect sense. [10:00] More of a should instead of want to attitude, which is a prevalent value in my life even now. I don't drive the speed limit out of respect for others and hoping I won't hurt them. I mostly drive, when I do drive the speed limit, out of a sense of duty or knowing that I might be caught, and other such reasons that aren't really the best.

I do have the sense that there are some values that are more laudable, more what I ought to be going for than others. And when I look at my life and evaluate myself, I have to honestly say that I don't always evaluate myself against my [11:00] highest, most important values. I'm not sure why that is. I don't know if I...I would probably live up to my values more completely if I was bringing the most important values into consideration, but I don't.

This example, driving the speed limit again. If I'm looking at the speed limit and thinking about it, which I often don't. I just drive habitually faster than I should. But if I look at the speedometer and I think, oh I'm going too fast. The first thought that [12:00] comes into my mind is, I wonder if a cop is  around? The second thought is, I don't see a cop, and this law is ridiculous anyway. There's no problem with going 40 miles per hour in a 35-mile-per-hour zone. Even when I've gotten caught, I haven't felt like I've done any damage to anybody. I've just been upset that I got a ticket. But if I were to think instead, I wonder what my driving this way might do to someone. If a child were to run out from behind a car, or if a child were to see me driving the wrong speed, would they form a bad attitude or habit themselves?

Those are questions that [13:00] go more to the heart of the key value, which is blessing the lives of others. And if I were to have that be my guiding value, maybe I wouldn't have to worry about the duty ones or the law ones that are also my values. I think that's an interesting concept to explore, when I’m contemplating in my and other people's evaluation lives. Which values do we prioritize over others and why?

I think in this case, I prioritize the law and duty ones over the love and caring and respecting ones, because I can rationalize myself out of them more easily [14:00] than I can out of the higher values that I hold. If I weren't rationalizing myself out of those, I might have to keep them and that's not so easy to do. I don't necessarily want to keep them. But if I were keeping them for the right reasons, I probably would keep them, wouldn't I? Yeah. I'd be more likely to, because I would be thinking about what it could be doing to somebody else. I think that's an interesting concept I hadn't thought of [15:00] until just now as I'm walking along with Ruby and thinking about my relative values.

So what else? So another value that I remember learning was when I was—and this is my first memory—I was out in the backyard playing with our dog at my grandparents’ house. We lived in an apartment behind their house, so it was also our house. And for some reason, I decided I wanted to take all my clothes off. And I was probably [16:00] two years old, maybe a little older. And I started taking off my clothes. And then I heard someone coming, and I was afraid that they would find me naked. So I quickly put my clothes back on. They were coming out on the porch on the back part of the big house, and I didn't want them to see me. So I quickly put my clothes back on. And now that I've thought about that example, I've wondered why in the world a two-year-old was worried about that. Why would I care if somebody saw me doing that? [17:00] I think that somehow I developed a value that said it's not the right thing to do, to run around outside without your clothes on. I don't know why I had developed that already at a young age, because I know lots of two-year-olds that don't worry about that. I don't know if I'd been doing that quite a bit and my parents said don't do that, so I was feeling like I was disobeying my parents or if I somehow learned that people should wear clothes. I just don't know why that would have been [18:00] an issue, but I know it was. That was one of the stronger feelings that I had, that I was doing something that I shouldn't do. And I needed to deal with it and move on to a different place pretty quickly or feel really bad about it. So I think I got my clothes back on, and I went on playing. I don't think anybody found me, and so I was safe from fulfillment of my big fear.

I think probably [19:00] examples of that kind of value are in my life now too, and have been all throughout my life. I think they are in some of my tendencies toward introversion, not wanting others to know what's going on and know my thoughts and my feelings. I think those might be related to the same concept that is manifest through this little two-year-old example. If I'm really angry, I don't express it outwardly with words. I do express it through my looks, and people who know me know that I'm angry and we have to [20:00] figure out what to do about that sometimes, and it's kind of painful. But I push those things in. I hide them from the world around me.

I've been learning from talking with [my son] Ryan, who's been training to be a chaplain, that his main job as a chaplain is to help people verbalize and externalize some of their feelings that they've been internalizing, because it's a much more healthy way to live. And they're able to then move forward with lots of experiences and concerns that they have in a much healthier way.

So how did I start that value? [21:00] I believe from my rational education, that hiding one's feelings, even if they're unpleasant, or maybe especially if they're unpleasant, does no one any good. It doesn't do me any good, and it doesn't help anyone around me.

So it ties back into that first value that I mentioned, which is caring about others. If I really care about others, then I should want to express my anger and other such feelings early on, so they are not hurt and wondering what's going on and coming up to me like they did throughout high school asking me what I'm angry about, even though [22:00] I didn't know I looked like I was angry and didn't particularly feel any anger towards them. Instead of telling them how I was feeling and what was going on in my life, I just kept it to myself and said there wasn't anything wrong and that's just the way I look.

So internalizing versus externalizing my feelings does seem to be a key value exchange or trade off that I've developed throughout my life, that I haven’t resolved. I don't feel happy about how I've ended up doing it. I certainly don't think I've done it right or am doing it right all the time now. [23:00] When I hear Ryan talking about what he's learning with the chaplaincy, I wish that he was around all the time to help me bring out the issues that are bothering me that I need to resolve so that I'm not feeling eaten up inside by them  and I'm also not offending or hurting anyone else by what I'm doing. So, there's a value conflict I feel there. And again, I think it goes back to that experience outside when I was two years old. And it's interesting to see that it ties into the other value of [24:00] respecting others.

I think maybe I should talk a little bit more about that one. I think my whole interest in evaluation and particularly in the idea of understanding and involving and serving stakeholders ties into this caring for an other’s value. I think that the focus on measurement, getting at truth, doing social science, those are all different focuses that I’ve read about that people have for doing evaluation. But none of those get me very excited compared to the idea that [25:00] evaluation, well done, can really help people. Can help them make choices that they're happy about, can help them pay attention to the choices that other people have to make, concerns that other people have. And if I could work out a way to help those people, then I could feel more fulfilled in my job, my assignment.

Essentially, finding truth is a value that I have, but why find truth? Well, the main reason for finding truth is to help others with that truth. [26:00] Why else would I want to find truth? Likewise, why would I want to do good social science? I don't know, because it would help people more than doing bad social science? I think caring about others is the underlying value that guides everything else that I do, that makes my life seem worthwhile and interesting and worth living. But I don't always live up to that value and I allow other values to intercede and kind of interfere with what I [27:00] was wanting to do for other people, focusing on doing for other people.

So probably everything I'm going to say about my own evaluation life is going to come back to those key values. And I suppose that's not a bad thing, it's just I worry now, that I may be oversimplifying it. I need to be careful to be honest about how I'm viewing all these things.

It probably helps to say that having a value and prioritizing that value over all other values intellectually or rationally [28:00] doesn't necessarily mean that that's what I do in actuality, because it very clearly isn't. I do all kinds of things that are not what I wish I were doing, or what I could do if I would.

So let's see, another example that comes to mind is one time when I was 5 or 6, I got in a little fight with that sister I was so nice to when I was 2. So there's evidence again that I didn't consistently live up to that value throughout my life from 2 years on. But to kind of pay her back or make her feel bad, I told her I was running away. And I went out and [29:00] walked around the block and went to a store and did a few things, all the time thinking that she'd feel really bad that she'd crossed my path. And sure enough, when I got back, she'd been crying the whole time, and she was really sad that I had left. I suppose at that time I was probably five and she was probably three. And I had a true sense of guilt and sorrow that I had done that to my sister. I knew that I had not treated her the right way. And I was sorry that I made her cry and feel so bad. [30:00]

So I suppose a lifetime of those kinds of experiences, going against my values, sometimes recognizing that that's what I'd done and repenting, feeling sorry, doing better, other times remaining in kind of a form of self-deception, blaming the other person for me not doing what I said I should do for them. That's kind of what my life's been made up of, a big combination of all those kinds of things. And so I'm thinking that that's got to be part of my self-evaluation life too. Going into the dead ends of self-deception, mistake-making, deciding what to do about [31:00] my mistakes, sometimes changing, often not. Those are all things that are clearly part of my evaluation life.

Theological Foundations

Transcriptionist: Marie Stirk

Speaker: David Williams

December 16, 2011

[0:00] DDW: Trent's birthday.Thirty years ago, this evening, that's a significant birthday. I am just realizing that I was 29, Denise was 28 when he was born. Pretty amazing. I just read a paper that he wrote for his PhD program on how entrepreneurs emerge in crises with different strategies and different evaluative ideas and results, values and standards. It's interesting to think about how he's doing evaluation in that context.

Anyway, so one thing I was thinking about overnight and since I did the previous recordings was what I might say about the love of the Church in my value formulations and my associated evaluations. I think my view of the Church and the principles [3:00] I'm taught through the Church are profoundly different than most people's. There I go with that familiar theme on how I'm different. Maybe everyone thinks they're different. I'm sure I do. And I clearly believe I am very different than the majority of the world because of my LDS Church membership upbringing and value setting. Nothing wrong with that. [4:00]

Before I dive into that, though, just a quick aside. This morning I read one of the AEA 365 postings, one out of Western Michigan University in which she talked about Rodney Hopson there at Western. He's an interesting African-American evaluator who has been talking for quite awhile about [5:00] being culturally competent, sensitive, informed. She posted an interesting reference to the 1969 piece by Scriven on metaevaluation and I believe that they are talking somewhat about the same thing I am, but in a different way. They seem to really be saying that race, culture, values, different definitions of these things and what matters should be [6:00] an important part of any evaluation. They seem to be reflecting on how our values and cultural perspectives do and don't take into account values and cultural perspectives of people that we're doing evaluation with and that evaluation itself is a value and a cultural perspective that shouldn't be unthoughtfully administered.

I agree with that. I think the basis of the series of studies that I'm doing is that we ought to better understand [7:00] and help those we're working with to understand the value of diversity that we are dealing with when we're making evaluative judgments. And that we've been making those throughout our lives and they are deep-rooted, not casual, easily dismissed kinds of things. I'm excited to read this 1969 piece by Scriven in which he states right up front that meta-evaluation [8:00] is both about evaluation of particular evaluations, but it's also a review and analysis of the role of evaluation in society. And again, I think that's very relevant to what I'm interested because I think society is made up of individuals and their social partners that together create and modify, expand and contract their evaluation [9:00] definitions, their values, and their stance on multiple stakeholders, their views on how to negotiate differences in values among different stakeholders as highlighted by any particular evaluand or evaluation request or need. So this story was written in 1969. Scriven's been talking about these things in various ways for a very long time. And I'd like to be able to tie in to that conversation [10:00] not to repeat it particularly, but I would like to explore it and expand upon it.

I need to contact Scriven like I did Schwandt and ask him about the study I'm doing and anything else he thinks might have been written about  these topics. I'd really like to get his evaluation life narrative too. I wonder if he'll be around long enough for me to do that, and if he'd be willing. [11:00] Maybe something like that's already been done too. I don't know.

Anyway, so now back to my review of the Church and its influence on my value establishment. I think what I have to say about this is probably not news to anybody that's a member of the Church, but maybe it is. For me, the gospel or the body of truth that God has revealed throughout all recorded history that we have and much more are, as in the Book of Mormon, Christ explains, He has revealed these truths to many other people besides the ones that are reading. Anyway, the body of those revelations and [13:00] all the implications of those revelations about God and his workings for his children constitute what I would call the doctrine of the gospel of Heavenly Father. And the Church as we know it right now is a subset of that. But when I think of my Church membership, I'm usually thinking of something much bigger entirely than thinking about who I am as a human being encapsulated [14:00] in an importantly unique way by God and his plan and his revelations of this plan for me. So when I think about my development into an evaluating, valuing a person, I don't see that as one thing and then my Church membership and my beliefs as something else. Everything I am is subsumed under my understanding of those revelations God has made to prophets and that I've [15:00] read or been taught and been coming to understand.

If I'm going to do a case study of myself as an evaluator, I can't imagine doing that without exploring who I believe I am as a human being who evaluates. I don't know how I can share all that information with people who are not believers in God in the first place [16:00] who might not be able to listen to me as soon as they know they know that they're seeing much of what I understand and believe and use in my daily evaluation life on this foundation that they either don't understand or have rejected. I guess that's another reason for thinking that a lot of what I'm talking about here [17:00] is another huge difference that I see between myself and others. I can't even really talk about my value system through most of the world, because they either don't understand these foundations or they understand some part of them and reject them, or like most scholars who are also members of the Church, they view this discussion as something that you do in a faith community, not in a scholarly community. I can see that point, but I don't like it because if a scholarly community is going to [18:00] stop me from sharing such fundamental dimensions of who I am as an evaluator, what's the point in trying to have a discussion with members of that scholarly community?

On the other hand, how do I know that they're going to reject everything I might say before I say it? I think that's one of the fundamental reasons that I've been pursuing these case studies and now these narrative stories of people's evaluation lives. If I'm conducting good research, documenting carefully what people, including myself, [19:00] say about evaluation lives, that's a way of entering this information into the scholarly discussion that provides scholars with an opportunity to attend to these issues or to explicitly reject them. To explicitly reject them, it could be because of the way that I've presented them, or it could be because they're just not ready to explore the more fundamental nature of human beings.

Okay, so that's it. I think the reason I'm claiming all these things is because I don't believe that only I am [20:00] who I am as described by God's revelations, but I believe everybody is, even though they don't know it. And/or they don't accept it.

So what are these fundamentals? Basic and most fundamental is that God has revealed through several prophets that we are his children in several different ways. That's a pretty profound concept that has many, many implications. Even more fundamental [21:00] than that, and I do need to come back and explore these, but even more fundamental than that revelation is the revelation that before we became his children, we existed as intelligences, that he did not create our intelligences. So I existed as an intelligence long before--I mean, time is a whole different issue, but plays into this, but it's confusing and I don't understand and I don't think the revelation tells us very much about time. But before time was, I existed as an eternal intelligence, and that same intelligence will always exist. And the reason this is so foundational for evaluation is that there is something about our intelligence that makes it possible for us to choose among options that we have before us.

I believe one of the first choices I made as an intelligence was to accept Heavenly Father's invitation to become his spirit child. [23:00] I don't know if somehow I was related to him before that or if there are just numberless intelligences that he, because he had progressed beyond an unembodied intelligence, he was able to somehow identify me and others who may have been related to one another and he was able to invite us all to become his spirit children. I will assume that there were probably intelligences that chose not to [24:00] accept his invitation, because I think that's the most fundamental, basic root characteristic of intelligences--  choice or agency, the ability to decide whether they will accept options that are presented to them or not. Probably goes beyond that. There may have been some of those intelligences that were looking around for options and they may have seen that God had a body and a lot more ability than they did just as intelligences. [25:00] It seems natural enough that would have been the way it was. I'm quite sure that God did not force me to become his spirit child. Essentially, I believe that God is a more advanced intelligence than I was. I don't know if that means he was just more intelligent overall, [26:00] which is probably the case, or if he somehow got a head start. No idea. I'm assuming that we progressed as intelligences as well. I'm assuming that we didn't just start at some ground zero level and God invited us to become his spirit children, but rather we had been progressing as spirit children or as intelligences to a level that when he invited us, we chose to become part of his plan (or to join him in his plan would be a better way to say it). [27:00]

Another fundamental belief I have is that God lives according to rules and laws. He doesn't just make them up. He reveals them to us as his laws often, and maybe he's adapted the laws in some ways to help us have experiences we're having, which will ultimately lead to our fulfillment as intelligences in a much greater way than we could if we had to live by the full law. For example, with the law of justice, [28:00] which I believe says whatever thing is done that's contrary to the law, has to be paid for. So now, if I jump off of a cliff, the law of gravity says I have to fall until I hit the bottom. And that isn't something that God just made up to torture us. It's a law. I don't know if that's the case with gravity actually. It may be that gravity is something that, like time, is just for us now at this time in the world and that when we move on [29:00] to later stages, it's very possible that gravity won't have the same effect on us.

So anyway, my view is that God invited us to become his spirit children, and revealed truth to us, which then gave us a new choice that we hadn't known. And I think that's the role of truth. Truth is essentially a statement of a law that we're either living up to or not. [30:00] And God had more of that truth than we had, for whatever reason, and so when he offered me the opportunity to be his spirit child, he invited me as an intelligent agent to choose to obey that law or not. I think that's pretty profound. That has amazing implications for my views on evaluation for [31:00] the development of my values.

So what I'm believing and claiming here is that from eons ago, I've been forming my values. I've been forming my values based on truth that has been revealed to my intelligence, or to me as an intelligence, as an intelligent agent. And then depending on how I've responded to that truth with my evaluative choices, I've either gained or lost more truth [32:00] and increased or decreased my capacity to make future evaluations.

So for example, I chose to accept God's plan to become his spirit son. I imagine there were other intelligences who were afraid of that, at least at that point in the offer. Maybe later on they accepted the offer, but I just powerfully and categorically believe that God did not force any of us to become his spirit children. That was a choice. [33:00] Maybe it's possible that we chose at that juncture to become a certain kind of spirit child or maybe that was determined already by the nature of our intelligence.

So for example, the two extremes that we know about from revelations are Jesus Christ and Satan. They obviously both chose to become God's spirit sons and had great amounts of intelligence, probably more than any of the rest of us that are part of this world. But [34:00] Christ through his use of intelligence, his intelligence, chose to do everything that the Father wanted done. He chose to follow truth completely. Whereas Satan eventually, they say he was the son of the morning, so he was a bright light. But he eventually chose the very opposite of the Father's will, which I believe was the very opposite of truth. He chose untruth, to fight against truth with all his capacity. [35:00]

The truth was that this was Heavenly Father's plan and therefore only he could be the author of it and attain to all that went with it, the fathership, which was his glory. Satan wanted to deny that truth and basically somehow take upon himself the glory, which was an impossibility, because all that glory was based on working through law and one of the basic laws was to respect and work within the agency of all participants. Satan's plan [36:00] went completely against that. His plan was to save everybody, whatever that means, so that no one was lost, whatever that means, and then God would give Satan his glory. From what I understand of the revelations, that was an impossibility. That couldn't be done. It couldn't be done first because everyone has their agency, and that can't be taken away. If God were to somehow take away our agency, he would be violating an eternal law, and [37:00] so he can't do it. He's bound by that eternal law, just as Satan is.

Satan can't take away my agency. I can always evaluate and choose among options, among optional values and optional ways for me to act upon those values. Victor Frankel's story is a strong piece of evidence for that, that no matter what the Nazis did, Frankel and those around him always had a choice. [38:00] Many of them chose to succumb, to die, to go crazy, to hate. Frankel chose otherwise. The fact that he could means to me that any of them could.

So ultimately, I have to believe that Satan could have chosen to follow God, that God didn't look around and say, there's an intelligence that will reject me. Well, he may have, he may have through his intelligence have identified Satan as an individual that would accept a spirit body but would [39:00] reject everything else. He actually needed a person like that, I think. We needed to have opposition in all things, and Satan provides that. So does gravity, so do lots of other natural laws that provide opposition and so I'm not sure if maybe there were other intelligences that could have played Satan's part.

Clearly later we discovered that after we had our spirits and lived with Heavenly Father for eons--I have no idea how long or whether time was part of it, [40:00] but at some point, God presented his plan to everybody. Christ stepped forward and said he would not only accept and support the plan, but he would be the key figure that would come to Earth, live the perfect life, allow himself to die, be resurrected, take upon himself the just results of everyone's choices that violated law, and then because he had taken those [41:00] results upon himself without ever sinning himself, he would be in a position to make the case for any who would come to him and accept his very minimal requirements to be able to continue progressing.

In other words, I will make and have made many choices that could potentially stop me from future choices, but because of Christ and repentance, those barriers can be removed, and I can continue to have choices. [42:00] It's an amazing plan that allows all the players, because they're all intelligences, to be open to never-ending vistas and possibilities. That is, for everyone who will use their intelligence to choose truth, to choose God, to choose God's plan, to choose to hear and obey God's revelations of truth.

This is so logical, it just makes so much sense. And I'm sure that when I heard that plan, I rejoiced, [43:00] because as an intelligence that has now been educated even more in truth as one of God's spirit sons, I must have seen the possibility of becoming much more than I was. Maybe my intelligence itself would grow through all the choices that were before me. Certainly the good choices as well as the bad choices, because I could back out of them through repentance, because of Christ, because of Father's plan.

So Satan basically argued an empty argument [44:00] that in my perspective no one should have listened to. But either because of the nature of their intelligence and their evaluative choices as intelligences right then or over time, and Satan's persuasive powers... He was a very bright light, I'm reminded, because of those dimensions a whole third of Heavenly Father's children chose to go with Satan [45:00] and basically make him their father and follow his lies. He's the father of lies. He gave them untruth. We could say he gave them some truths mixed with untruths, but the very mixing makes the truths not truths anymore. By doing that, he confused a lot of intelligences who chose to listen to him, who chose to not listen to Father and not listen to Christ, which [46:00] is astounding to me. I don't know if that's a third of all God's children, because he had never-ending children, or if that's a third of the ones that were assigned to come to this earth. I don't know that.

Again, I'm not sure if the revelations have told us that, but a third of them said, no, we don't want physical bodies. We've gone as far as we're going to go. We'll keep these spirit bodies. They must have looked around and said, how did we get these? I don't know how they could reject the creator of their spirit bodies. Maybe at that point, they were wanting to get rid of their spirit bodies and just be intelligences. Or maybe, in an outer darkness sort of way, they just wanted to stop existing as intelligences or anything else, but they can't. Intelligences are not created and cannot be destroyed. They simply are. So somehow they were cast down to this earth as spirits only, unable to be housed in physical bodies. And Satan came with them, and he too, can't have a physical body. He can take on all kinds of forms, [48:00] but only in the eyes of the beholder, I guess. Moses was able to recognize him as not being who he said he was. Adam and Eve after they partook of the fruit were able to also identify Satan for who he really was. Before that, they didn't know who he was I don't think.

So the rest of us made an evaluative decision to accept more of God's truth and that involved coming to this earth and receiving physical bodies. God set up a system for that to happen. [49:00] Might have been through evolution, but certainly through physical parents for all of us, so it probably was for Adam and Eve somehow, too. Our physical bodies had truth. I view my physical body as a gift. It's not a terrible awful thing to be exploited and gotten rid of. Likewise, the life that I have in this body is God-given. It's not something that others have any right to take away from me, although they have their agency and they've got the capacity [50:00] to take my life away. So in that sense, they do have the right, but doing it violates laws that can be vocalized as God gave me this life, only God can take it away or should be able to. That's why I could never evaluate my life or make the choice that I should take my own life. I don't have that right. If I do, I'm violating a law that says we don't take away our own lives. So all the stuff that I was learning about philosophy of Mormonism and all that a few years ago [51:00] about life being the great good. I can see how it fits in there. Michael Arts is the one that was teaching that class, and the stuff that he wrote about that is really fascinating. I'm going to go back and review that some more, because it's become a big part of my view of myself as an evaluator.

I feel like I'm now--If I make the right choices, I'm a co-eternal evaluator with God. To that extent, I am like God. Of course, to the extent that I choose against truth, I'm not like God. [52:00] So that's what sin is in my mind-- that's going against truth that would help me become more like God. Sin is not doing something that a mean, vindictive bodiless undefined being just forces upon me, and that I need to fight against. That's a satanic lie. That's not the way it is. The way it is is there are truths. God lives by them. He invites me to live by them. To the extent that I do live by them, I am making wise evaluative choices and then becoming more like him. [53:00] And that process, I believe, can go on for eternity, as long as I don't make choices that stop that process, like Satan and his group, a third of God's children, who made that choice before we even came here and got bodies. And I believe Cain made that choice when he chose to kill his brother and to follow Satan in doing so. Satan lied to him. His parents were teaching him truth. God himself spoke to him. And he chose otherwise. So somehow he was willing to go one step further than Satan. He was willing to actually come and have a physical body as well as a spiritual body. [54:00] But he wasn't willing to keep God's commandments. He wasn't willing to obey truth. And that stopped him in his progress, or damned him. God didn't damn him; he damned himself. And maybe that's why that phrase is such a terrible one because God blesses, he doesn't damn. Violation of truth damns, stops the progress of anybody that chooses to do that.

So anyway, [55:00] the bottom line of all that is that I believe I've been making evaluations forever. And I always will be making evaluations if I make the ones that are in line with truth; they will lead to more choices. I believe that God has given us all kinds of help to be good evaluators. First of all, he's given us revelations of truth. He does that through many means. Ultimately the main means is his Spirit, which comes in different forms. [56:00] The light of Christ is part of his Spirit. The whisperings of the Holy Ghost are another. The light of Christ, by the way, might be the same thing as our conscience, or maybe that's another element. And then the gift of the Holy Ghost is the ultimate gift of God's light that can confirm and reveal truth, whatever the actual voice for that truth might be. Maybe it's a prophet, maybe it's a parent, maybe it's a neighbor, teacher, [57:00] anyone that can state the truth or open the door to truth for me, can be a tool in God's hands and he through the spirit influences can confirm that that's true.

This can be a different truth for different people at different stages, so for example Abraham was commanded to kill and then he was--that commandment was taken away. It wasn't a truth for him that he should kill his son Isaac. It was a truth that he should be invited to do so, commanded to do so, and then [58:00] commanded not to do so. Nephi, on the other hand, was commanded to kill Laban, and he had to do it, in order to not damn his own progress and the progress of the people he was caring for. So same act, but different truths associated with it. I'm commanded to be held by a gravitational pull, but Jesus wasn't. After his resurrection, he ascended up into heaven. I'm anticipating that different truths will be revealed to me depending on which truths [59:00] I use my agency to evaluate as truth and follow. So the very following of God is an evaluation. It's a manifestation of what I'm valuing. I'm valuing what God is saying and what the Spirit is telling me as well as what I'm seeing with my eyes, hearing with my ears, feeling with my body.

All of those are conduits of truth. They're also conduits of anti-truth, and that's what makes every act I take from thoughts, feelings, all of those [1:00:00] are impacted by my choice. I choose to feel angry. I choose to feel rejected. I choose to feel hopeful. I choose to act on those feelings in order to change those feelings.

Ultimately evaluation is an act of responsibility. It's claiming our responsibility as intelligences to respond to truth. So I think that's what Richard Williams was arguing in different ways, but I think ultimately, I'm saying what he's saying. [1:01:00] Truth, choice between truth and nontruth or higher or lower truths are applied to us as revealed through the Holy Ghost as well as our logical processes. I don't think the Holy Ghost is illogical, confirmations are true. If something's true, it may look illogical on the face of it, like killing your own son when you've been promised that you're going to have nations come through that son. It's illogical. And ultimately, [1:02:00] Abraham followed the Spirit, which confirmed to him that he should not kill Isaac.

So anyway, that's a lot of stuff. And I don't know how I can share all that with other academics I might want to talk to about evaluation without telling that whole story. And that's not the full story even there. There's much more to it, but those are the basics I was able to talk about on this blog.

From SPG Field Notes—Moving Forward on DDW Evaluation Life

July 27, 2013

In my study of Dr. Williams evaluation life.  I was able to make some headway by organizing some of the materials he opened to me in google documents.  I read through these pieces right away and then read through them again and began making comments as I did so.  I have kept the classroom audiotapes and the interview audiotapes as part of that documentation. I have puzzled over the patterns and themes that are in these documents and have been trying to get a sense of what would bring them together into a “study.”  

In order to get a sense of what direction to take in creating an analysis and pulling things together for a report, I have been reading a doctoral dissertation by Deb Holloway who got her PhD from the University of Colorado in education in 2001.  Hers is a qualitative study (see 5-fold analysis)  of adolescent girls who participated in an Artists in Residence (AIR) community arts program based on an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that integrated the works of Lev Vygotsky, Mikkail Bakhtin, and Pierre Bourdieu’s critical feminist theory.  Deb used some quantitative and some qualitative approaches to her study to produce individual portraits of the girls in their school context.  

Although Deb’s dissertation is probably not the right model for the studies we are doing in the classroom, it does bring up some important questions for us.  For one, she begins with a clear theoretical stance.  She bases her work on Lev Vygotsky’s activity theory, Mikkail Bakhtin’s ideas of voice and Bourdieu’s ideas of “field” and “habitus.”  

This question of theoretical stance has come up several times in Williams’ conversations with his professional evaluators.  This study helps to see why.  Everyone expects Dr. Williams to do what Deb has done.  Do his homework.  Adopt a position.  Back into a famous theory or two.  Develop a framework for defining what is happening between people.  But Dr. Williams resists that suggestion.  I think what he wants is to discover the individual theoretical frameworks of his evaluators themselves. Rather than imposing his own, he wants to reveal theirs.   He really likes the stories people tell about themselves.  As he said in the interview, he’s a listener.  

He does have a theoretical position.  And he worries about imposing it.  His theoretical position is his religious belief.  And he can’t say it to all those professional evaluators.  He hopes that they will realize the truth of their lives for themselves.  It’s not professional of him to bring his religion to evaluation study.  But it’s a big problem because he thinks it is the truth.  It is how he sees the world.  It provides the values by which the world is revealed to him and the values that guide his choices.  So of course it shapes how he sees the stories of his professional evaluators’ lives.  But he doesn’t want to impose it on them.

Haha!  What if true ideas make you a better listener.  What if the truth makes you more open to hear and listen to what people say and mean.  In fact, maybe that is the litmus test of truth that it opens you up to greater appre[compre?]hension of what people’s value systems truly are.  

In any case this question of theoretical framework is also an important question to the personal evaluation life study of both Dr. Williams and me.  I always think that the nature of research and examination is that you are trying “capture” or listen intently to what the other person is trying to say, their values, purposes, experiences, ideas.  As we learn from good qualitative studies, however, you don’t leave your own assumptions behind and it is well to learn how to detect your own value structures and systems as you explore those of others.  Knowing both will clarify both.

And here is another quote from Gong's document pointing out me (DDW) trying to figure out my values and alternative values I might consider in going my daily evaluations. Gong's comments are in red.

DDW Field Notes—Annotated Thoughts on Evaluation

January 13, 2012  

After visiting with Denise for half an hour or so, I listened to a Ted talk by Malcolm Gladwell in which he was talking about a fellow named Howard Moskowitz, who helped Prego with their spaghetti sauces. The main thing that he did to help them was to introduce the idea of focusing on variation in people's evaluations of different kinds of spaghetti sauces instead of trying to find one right spaghetti sauce for everyone.

He noted in his talk that people are not able to tell you what they like as well as select from things that they taste to identify what they really like. I think that has a lot of important implications for doing evaluation of all kinds. I'm pretty sure that Denise's piano students and their parents are acting out with their practicing efforts, their encouragement of their children to practice efforts, and other behaviors, what they really think and feel about learning piano. Whereas if we were to ask them how they feel about piano practicing and learning, they would probably tell us what they think we want to hear.

Well, this whole discussion is very astute, I think.  Not only for the parsing of the issues, but for the recognition that the values might remain undiscovered for many reasons, not the least of which is that the students or their parents, or the teacher, for that matter, might not know what these values are themselves.  How many children berate their parents as adults because the parents gave in and gave up, and the children quit before they were old enough to know what they would eventually come to value themselves.

So in all of these examples, the main thing I'm finding is that to understand people's evaluation lives, they need to be observed as well as invited to talk. Also, understanding the variety of ways people evaluate is at least as important as discovering the similarities among their evaluation habits.

This dictation program is working pretty well. As I'm evaluating it I'm seeing my own evaluation life demonstrated. In particular, I have not used the program for a few weeks. Why? I think it's because I got frustrated trying to work with Word documents instead of using the DragonDictate Notepad notes. I’m going to copy what I’m dictating here into a folder on the Denise case study project. And then I’ll take some of the rest of what I dictated and put it into my self-evaluation folder.

As the primary way of using Microsoft Word documents, I had expectations of what the norm should be for dictating into Word using Dragon Dictate; but when those criteria or expectations were not met I got frustrated. But now, I'm able to sit here on the floor, stretching, and looking occasionally at the screen up on the desk, while I think out loud and have my thoughts appear in print.

This experience seems to confirm what Gladwell was saying about Moskowitz. Rather than trying to find the one spaghetti sauce that would be just right for everyone, he encouraged Prego to explore the many different kinds of spaghetti sauce that people would want to buy. He invited Prego to expand the kinds of criteria that they would consider in judging their spaghetti sauce. Now I am expanding my criteria for what it takes to get my thoughts down in writing....

So what does all this have to do with evaluation? In some ways, I feel that everything that I'm thinking and doing when I'm writing, teaching or reflecting on my work is a form of self-evaluation. And I'm thinking that by writing out what I'm doing, perhaps I will be able to get insights into how I evaluate and what I believe about evaluation.