Programs guided by those most affected

Dr Rhyall Gordon is the Program Planning and Evaluation Coordinator at the Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher Education at the University of Newcastle. His work strengthens the exchange between theory and practice in the design and learning of equity projects within the University and across community partnerships.

A central part of his role involves leading program inquiry and evaluation initiatives that support practitioners to engage critically with questions of purpose, rationale, and logic, and to situate their work within broader social justice commitments.

Rhyall’s evaluation practice draws on culturally responsive, developmental, and capacity-building frameworks. He has extensive experience in community development and community-based research, with expertise across areas such as homelessness and affordable housing, gender-based violence, and work with migrant and refugee communities. His PhD focused on non-capitalist community economies in the north of Spain, exploring how economic collectives in the Asturias region, and their community economy practitioners, are developing economic practices to pursue more equitable and sustainable worlds.

A common thread across his work is a commitment to challenging knowledge hierarchies and foregrounding marginalised voices in the processes of developing, understanding, and evidencing program impact. His scholarship and practice are guided by an interest in how evaluation can contribute to equity-focused learning and systemic change—connecting the ethical and political dimensions of evaluation with its practical role in transforming the conditions that shape people’s lives. You can read more about this in Rhyall’s paper (with colleagues) entitled “Evaluation for equity: reclaiming evaluation by striving towards counter-hegemonic democratic practices.” (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00220620.2021.1931059)

Rhyall has co-led workshops on evaluation methodologies through the Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success (ACSES) Community of Practice and at other universities, contributing to sector-wide learning on critical and participatory approaches to evaluation. He is currently a co-editor of a Special Issue on Evaluation for Equity and Social Justice for the journal ACCESS.

Rhyall is also leading the evaluative aspects of the Reclaiming My Place Healing and Recovery project, supported by funding from the Primary Health Network, which seeks to strengthen trauma-informed and culturally grounded practices that promote healing and wellbeing.

In 2026, Rhyall will lead an externally funded project to develop practitioner resources for program design and evaluation. The project proposes the development of a practitioner toolkit to support context-responsive, justice-oriented program design and evaluation in the higher education equity sector. Centred on how leverage the use of program logic models, it draws on Carol Bacchi’s What’s the Problem Represented to Be? (WPR) approach to critically examine how equity “problems” are framed. By integrating WPR with the Student Equity in Higher Education Evaluation Framework (SEHEEF), the toolkit aims to strengthen practitioners’ capacity to design initiatives that are both evaluable and socially transformative. It is hoped the project will contribute to sector-wide learning and more equitable approaches to program logic and evaluation practice.