Talking Circles: A Culturally Responsive Evaluation Practice

Talking Circles are safe spaces where relationships are built, nurtured, reinforced, and sometimes healed; where norms and values are established; and where people connect intellectually, spiritually, and emotionally with other members of the Circle. The Circle can also be an evaluation method that increases voice, decreases invisibility, and does not privilege one worldview or version of reality over another. The purpose of this article is to describe how the Circle can be a culturally responsive evaluation practice for those evaluators wishing to build relationships, share power, elicit stakeholder voice, solve problems, and increase participants’ capacity for program design, implementation, and evaluation. Circles can be used by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous evaluators. By offering the global evaluation community this concrete, practical, and culturally responsive approach, we open the door so that others can build on this work and offer additional insights as this practice is used, refined, and documented.