Macdonald, Barry

(b. 1932, Aberdeen, Scotland). Ph.D. (Honoris Causa), University of Valladolid, Spain; M.A., Dip.Ed., M.Ed., University of Aberdeen, Scotland.

MacDonald was Director of CARE (the Centre for Applied Research in Education) at the University of East Anglia. Following studies in modern languages, education, and educational psychology at the University of Aberdeen, he spent some time as a teacher and teacher educator in Scotland, where he experimented with case study approaches to the building of teacher confidence in the classroom. In 1968, he moved to London to undertake the role of evaluator of Lawrence Stenhouse's controversial Humanities Curriculum Project.

MacDonald was the first to articulate a political typology of evaluation, and he contributed substantially to the development of a case study approach to evaluation. Stenhouse and MacDonald eventually used the Humanities Curriculum Project as an intellectual base to found CARE. The necessity to observe and understand this complex project across 36 school sites led MacDonald to experiment with the intensive study and dissemination of individual cases. In this, he was working in parallel with Robert Stake, Louis Smith, and others in the United States. This shared perspective resulted in the formation of an enduring transatlantic group through the Cambridge Conferences, which codified and articulated democratic and case study principles for evaluation. MacDonald went on to direct the Ford Success and Failure and Recent Innovation (SAFARI) project (1973–1975), in which case study and democratic evaluation methodologies were further elaborated and published. A central feature of the SAFARI project was the generation of teacher biographies as a basis for theorizing about innovation. Other large-scale evaluation projects (e.g., the Understanding Computer-Assisted Learning Evaluation) followed and became further demonstrations for democratic, case-based approaches. In 1978, MacDonald was invited by the Ford Foundation to conduct a policy evaluation of bilingual schooling in the United States. The study was founded mainly on a single school case study (its historical and contemporary contexts) in Boston. In 1999, MacDonald received an honorary doctorate from the University of Valladolid, Spain, in recognition of his contributions to educational evaluation, in particular, and to the post-Franco democratization of Spanish education in general.