Hall, Budd L.

(b. 1943, Long Beach, California). Ph.D. Comparative and International Education, UCLA; M.A. Education, B.A. Political Science, Michigan State University.

Hall is Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria, Canada, and was previously Chair of the Adult Education Department and taught participatory research and evaluation at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. He served as Secretary-General of the International Council for Adult Education from 1979 to 1991 and worked as the head of evaluation and research in the Institute of Adult Education, University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, from 1970 to 1974.

Hall's primary contributions have been to the theory and practice of participatory research and evaluation. His first publication, in 1975, was a special issue of the journal Convergence that included a number of international articles on the then new field of participatory research. Hall has applied participatory evaluation in many contexts, such as a large-scale project on community learning that explored renewal options for coastal communities in British Columbia facing economic collapse in the wake of contraction of resource-based economies.

His work has been influenced by the ideas of the late Julius Nyerere, former present of Tanzania, and Paulo Freire. Julius Nyerere had a profound belief in the capacity of ordinary women and men to know their own environment and to learn how to change the conditions that affect their lives. Hall met Paulo Freire in 1971 when he visited Tanzania. Freire's exploration of the thematic ideas of rural peoples was an early elaboration of an approach to research, and ultimately to evaluation, in which identification of ideas came directly from the women or men most closely involved with the issues at hand. Hall and his colleagues at the Institute of Adult Education began to experiment with participatory approaches to evaluation.

Hall is a lifetime member of the National Institute for Adult and Continuing Education of England and Wales and has delivered more than 40 keynote addresses in 27 countries.