Illuminative Evaluation

To an English teacher, illuminative may simply be an adjective. To a historian of ideas, this adjective carries connotations of enlightenment. To evaluators, however, it has a more specific denotation: “Evaluation as Illumination: A New Approach to the Study of Educational Innovations,” a paper written at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, by a lecturer (Malcolm Parlett) and one of his doctoral students (David Hamilton). The article took 18 months to prepare. Drafts were sent out for comment and (such was the power of the emergent democracy of the photocopier) bootleg copies circulated widely. For this reason, scientific journals eventually declined to publish it.

“Evaluation as Illumination” originally appeared in mimeo form, in 1972, as an occasional paper of the Department of Educational Sciences, University of Edinburgh. Thereafter, it was reprinted, to the authors' knowledge, 11 times between 1976 and 1988. By the latter date, the novelty of the term had dissipated or merged with cognate ideas. Nevertheless, the label survived. In early 2003, an Internet inquiry using “illuminative evaluation” as a search term generated 84 pages of references (almost 500 entries).

It would be easy, therefore, to write this entry as a fireside memoir, a victory narrative, or, what amounts to the same thing, a paean of self-justification. This encyclopedia entry, however, has a different aspiration. It puts illuminative evaluation into its historical context, as an example of a professional field in the making. It addresses four questions: Why was “Evaluation as Illumination” written? What did it say? Why is it still cited? How should it be regarded, in hindsight?

In its simplest form, “Evaluation as Illumination” was the outcome of joint collaboration. It was composed—a more accurate characterization than “written”—by two people who came together with different backgrounds. They found a point of contact; they negotiated a view of writing as composing, and, word by word, they struggled with each other to find a common language to harmonize and express their shared interests. Thereafter, they continued their intellectual journeys in different directions. Within a decade, Malcolm Parlett had left the university world and became a Gestalt therapist; David Hamilton followed a conventional academic career—a path that, in his [Page 192]case, would have been unlikely without the cultural capital he accumulated through coauthoring “Evaluation as Illumination.”

At the outset of their collaboration, Malcolm Parlett had acquired a doctorate in experimental psychology and David Hamilton had been a science teacher. Their point of contact was that they shared a disillusionment with inherited models of educational research. Parlett had suffered a profound reaction against the “methodolatry” of experimental psychology that, in the event, was alleviated by the clinically or person-oriented social scientists he met while working at Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral fellow. David Hamilton's intellectual angst stemmed from the gulf that existed between the universalist assumptions of educational research and the situated assumptions of practitioners, with rescue coming in the form of writings about classroom research by Louis M. Smith and Philip Jackson. Both of us felt, in effect, that there was merit in moving toward practice and practitioners.

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