NCID-1415
Melissa Goodnight
Lecturer
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Education/Degree:
1 Education (University of California Los Angeles)
About
Melissa Rae Goodnight is a lecturer in global studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she teaches undergraduate research courses. Her scholarly interests include culturally responsive evaluation and assessment, research design, writing pedagogy, human rights, and schooling for socially and linguistically marginalized communities. Melissa earned a PhD in education from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), specializing in comparative education and educational evaluation. As a Fulbright-Nehru Research Fellow in India, she completed her dissertation fieldwork investigating a large-scale, citizen-engaged evaluation of India's rural primary education system. While at UCLA, Melissa also taught academic writing and served as Editor of InterActions: UCLA?s Journal of Education and Information Studies. Her past research includes a study of social justice pedagogy and school reform in Chicago. Melissa previously worked at the University of Chicago's Urban Education Institute on a team that provided professional development programs to teachers and principals across Chicago Public Schools. Melissa became interested in education through her service as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Kingston, Jamaica where she worked as an HIV/AIDS educator.
Current Work
The needs addressed by Dr. Goodnight's current research are three-fold. The first is to understand, do evaluations matter and how? There are debates over how to conceptualize and study the impact of evaluations on society. Dr. Goodnight's research provides a case study for examining the democratic influence of a large-scale evaluation of education in India. The second need Dr. Goodnight's research addresses is the limitations of evaluation theory. Democratic and social justice theories of evaluation tackle issues of power, values, and inclusion in evaluation, but they have been theorized from Western contexts. At the same time, evaluation scholars emphasize the importance of conducting evaluations from a culturally competent standpoint that reflects knowledge of a context’s power dynamics and social inequities. Dr. Goodnight's research engages with evaluation theory in India amidst growing interest in evaluating its social systems for accountability, transparency and data-driven decision-making. Finally, Dr. Goodnight's research addresses a third need—to understand evolving perspectives on gender and women’s roles in Indian society and governance. Through studying women’s fieldwork and participation in evaluating education in India, Dr. Goodnight analyze how such activities influence their aspirations and plans for future work and leadership roles.
Research Area Keyword(s)
Comparative education, evaluation and social research, global studies, writing pedagogy