Greene, Jennifer C

(b. 1949, Palo Alto, California). Ph.D. Educational Psychology, M.A. Education, Stanford University; B.A. Psychology, Wellesley College.

Greene is Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Previously, she held faculty positions in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University and in the Department of Education at the University of Rhode Island.

Her contributions to evaluation have been substantial and center on work that has done much to legitimize participatory, value-engaged, democratizing approaches to evaluation. Greene's work on stakeholder-based evaluation and stakeholder involvement in evaluation is foundational work that has provided the basis for understanding how and why stakeholder involvement is important. More recently, she has extended this work through her analysis of the democratizing potential of dialogue and discussion in evaluation. Greene can also be credited with some of the most comprehensive work on mixed-method approaches to evaluation. This work provides both a conceptual framework and pragmatic guidance for mixed methods.

Greene's work in evaluation has been strongly influenced by Lee Cronbach's mentorship, especially his ideas on the importance of understanding the full contextual complexities of programs being evaluated and the use of evaluation to educate the “Policy-Shaping Community.” She also was encouraged by Egon Guba, especially his quiet insistence that Greene learn something about qualitative methods, and by the political ideas of Ernie House, in particular the very notion of doing evaluation for expressly political purposes, specifically social justice. More general intellectual influences, such as progressive politics, antiwar protests, and the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and “liberation” theories, such as those of Paulo Friere, are also evident in Greene's work. Being a true evaluation practitioner, Greene's contributions to the field are also born of her early evaluation work, which involved extensive fieldwork. Learning on the job and stretching her methodological repertoire at that early stage in her career were key experiences in shaping her intellectual interests and contributions to the theory and practice of evaluation.

As Coeditor of New Directions for Evaluation (with Gary Henry) from 1997 to 2004, Greene brought her appreciation of multiple approaches in evaluation to her work, in the selection of both topics and authors. She is on the Advisory Boards of the American Journal of Evaluation, Evaluation, and International Journal of Educational Technology.