Cartooning

Cartooning has been used as a tool to communicate findings in oral or written evaluation reports. Cartoons afford evaluators an opportunity to present findings in an illustrative and succinct way to attract the attention and interest of readers to an evaluation report. As pictorial representations, cartoons can reach out to audiences who may not be especially literate or familiar with the technical language in evaluation reporting. In this regard, cartoons are particularly useful for readers of an evaluation report who are visual learners.

The versatility of cartoons as a representational form can be seen in their ability to depict various kinds of ideas—humorous or grim; political, economic, or social; theological, philosophical, or psychological. The idea for a cartoon in an evaluation report can be derived in different ways. It can be perceived by an evaluator based on his or her interpretation of the data in an evaluation study. It can also be grounded in the data itself when evaluation participants provide information about humorous situations that highlight certain issues within an evaluand. An example of this is cartoon transcreation, a process of producing cartoon illustrations (from data and other sources pertinent to an evaluation study) that incorporate findings that constitute humor, findings that needed to be conveyed gently, or findings that are deemed important to create awareness among readers of the report. [Page 43]

Figure 1 An Example of a Cartoon Representation Produced From the Cartoon Transcreation Process

Once the idea has been conceived, an evaluator or a freelance cartoonist can draw the cartoon. Besides human figures, nonhuman figures can also be used to represent an evaluation finding. Cartoons using nonhuman figures are known as anthropomorphic cartoons: Animals or objects portray the behavior of humans. Along with technical credibility, it is important to ensure content credibility through feedback from evaluation participants whose information is depicted in the cartoons.

As an art form, cartoons are subject to multiple interpretations by readers of a report. The awareness of multiple interpretations can help readers realize and confront multiple realities and the complexity of the program being evaluated. Cartoons can also serve as a data collection tool if new pertinent information is gathered from multiple interpretations of the primary program stakeholders. This situation challenges current ontological and epistemological assumptions in conventional representational forms (graphs, tables, quotations, etc.) that reflect subject-object dualism, whereby a reader remains detached from a finding and excludes any value considerations from influencing it.

As an alternative form of representation, cartoons require audience assessment to ascertain if there is any cultural or social objection to cartooning before the decision is made to adopt cartoons to represent evaluation findings. In the context of an evaluation study in which the confidentiality of evaluation participants is upheld, caricatures may not be suitable in a cartoon representing findings. Used judiciously, a cartoon may very well help increase the repertoire of representational forms in an evaluator's toolbox.

The cartoon shown in Figure 1 depicts a finding about a child's motivation to read, based on data provided by an evaluation participant (parent) of an elementary school reading program in Florida known as SRA. It also illustrates a finding concerning the importance of home support for the child's motivation to read.

...