Who is this certificate for? Any young person who either is:

1. Already working on a research, evaluation, and/or policy project who wants a way to demonstrate their knowledge and skills
2. Interested in getting involved in research, evaluation, and/or policy but needs some support

We designed this process to work best for people ages 12-25, but generally believe it is useful for anyone in the early stages of learning about research, evaluation and policy. The certificate is coordinated by the Clinical Program at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Please reach out to wcerclinics@wcer.wisc.edu for more information.

Equity and social justice are core to the learning objectives and core competencies. Youth will have the opportunity to customize their experience through the participation of their organization and work in collaboration with adult allies, mentors, and community partners to identify which learning outcomes and competencies can be central to their experience.

Learning Objectives

• Youth will learn ways to observe, reflect, and critique (i.e., be “critically conscious”) how power works in education.
• Youth will learn and apply the processes of research, evaluation, and basic frameworks of critical policy analysis through the use of a certificate project guide tool.
• Youth will learn approaches to advocacy and action related to their own education interests.

Core Competencies

The core competencies demonstrated through the certificate are grouped into three primary categories: Research & Evaluation, Policy, and Critical Consciousness.

Research and Evaluation

We aim for youth to engage in research and evaluation that is culturally responsive and critical to address the systemic challenges of educational spaces. The certificate process will support youth in developing research and evaluation skills with a critical lens from the development of questions to the analysis of data collected. The following competencies draw from Culturally Responsive Evaluation (Hood et al, 2015) and Critical Qualitative Inquiry (Denzin, 2017):

• Understand the basic foundations of research and/or evaluation processes, key concepts, and how they relate to one another.
• Identify a “focus” issue/problem/opportunity and describe how that issue matters to you and your world.
• Collect, critically summarize, and identify holes in knowledge surrounding your focus issue.
• Develop a research or evaluation study to investigate your issue, including guiding questions.
• Conduct basic data collection and analysis in service of guiding questions.
• Communicate findings from your study to diverse audiences in ways that support change.
• Define positionality in relation to your issue and research and/or evaluation process.
• Describe specific ways in which research and/or evaluation can be used for change
• Collaborate and co-construct ideas with peers and adult allies.

Policy

We aim for youth to understand policy as a “sociocultural process through which power is claimed and denied” (Castagno & McCarty, 2018). This means that policy includes the social practices individuals engage in every day and the systems that influence them. The certificate process will support youth in building skills in understanding policy processes and how advocacy can be practiced to influence policy. The following competencies draw from Critical Policy Analysis (Diem et al, 2014):

• Define key terms in policy (i.e., problem definition, advocacy, brief, etc.).
• Identify organizational, local, state, and/or federal policies related to your focus issue.
• Describe systemic and structural influences and/or “root causes” on policies related to your focus issue.
• Identify and engage in decision-making spaces at the local and/or state level.
• Identify action/advocacy steps related to your focus issue.
• Develop communication strategies for speaking with different audiences about your focus issues.
• Show evidence of co-constructing ideas with peers and adult allies.

Critical Consciousness

We aim for youth to strengthen social justice competencies, which requires developing a critical consciousness of the systemic forces shaping our lives and how to build social action around them. The certificate process will support youth in taking and applying core concepts of critical consciousness to build a complex understanding of their identity, community and world. The following competencies are organized by awareness level and draw directly from the Social Justice Youth Development model by Ginwright and Cammarota (2002):