Framework visualisation and thematic analysis for the Transforming Education for Sustainable Futures (TESF) programme
TESF Evaluation
The TESF network was a 3-year, international project which brought together grassroots community projects and academics to co-create research and practices.
Freya assisted Dr Ash Brockwell with the external evaluation of this programme, co-designing and conducting the analysis of the Strand B Exploratory evaluation. Alongside this, Freya also created a visualisation of the approach taken to identifying and categorising project legacies.
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A spectrum of tangibility provided the framework which guided the thematic analysis of 67 final reports from the TESF funded projects. This spectrum encouraged a movement away a binary of tangible vs. intangible outcomes, instead understanding it as a broad spectrum. This stretched from the tacit, intangible outcomes, to the tangible outcomes that would typically be identified in traditional evaluation approaches, e.g. books, funding, exhibitions.
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Inspired by the context of the TESF network with its emphasis on sustainability and the diverse variety of local community projects across India, Rwanda, South Africa, Somalia and Somaliland, Freya re-imagined the original Spectrum of Tangibility (Brockwell & Graham-Gazzard, 2018)
through imagery from the 'more than human world'. This visualisation aimed to communicate the nurture and growth visible across all of the projects as well as their ecological dimensions.
From this emerged the image of a Baobab – a tall, towering tree with hanging fruits and a compact crown that mirrors its root system (see image on right, or page 22 in the report linked below). This tree, native to Madagascar, mainland Africa and Australia, provided the visual metaphor for a scale of tangibility, giving equal attention to the fruit and the roots.
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Baobab Tangibility Spectrum - Freya Gascoyne
Initial Spectrum of tangibility – from `least tangible’ to `most tangible’ legacies (Brockwell & Graham-Gazzard, 2018)
The Baobab Tangibility Spectrum graphic guided the subsequent exploratory thematic analysis, where examples of the different types of legacies (from type 1 - latent values, to type 5 - most tangible, often physical outcomes) were identified and tagged.
The Baobab, with its mirroring crown and root system, communicated the extra attention paid to identifying and recording the tacit, challenging-to-articulate outcomes alongside those more tangible ones that typically occupy the majority of traditional evaluation approaches.
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This visualisation features in the External Evaluator Report (page 22), and was used to communicate the exploratory evaluation approach at the TESF global legacy conference in 2023.