THIS IS NOT BY EISNER, BUT THERE ARE QUOTES BY EISNER YOU CAN USE & THE CITE IS AT THE END IN THE REFERENCES

elliot w. eisner, connoisseurship, criticism and the art of education

Elliot W. Eisner has deepened our appreciation of education in a number of areas. Here we examine his argument that education involves the exercise of artistry and the development of connoisseurship and criticism. We also assess his contribution to the debates around school reform.contents: introduction · elliot w. eisner · art ·artistry · elliot w. eisner on connnoisseurship and criticism · knowledge · elliot w. eisner's contribution to school reform · conclusion · further reading and bibliography · links · how to cite this article

see, also, on these pages: elliot w. eisner: what can education learn from the arts about the practice of education?

Elliot W. Eisner (1933-) has made a significant contribution to our appreciation of the educational process. He is particularly known for his work in arts education, curriculum studies, and educational evaluation. However, much of what he has to say has a resonance for a far wider readership.  Among his most noted works are The Educational Imagination (1979, 1985, 1994) - an exploration of the design and evaluation  of curriculum programmes); The Art of Educational Evaluation (1985) - a collection of essays covering key aspects of his earlier work; Cognition and Curriculum (1994)  - an examination of the mind and representation); and The Enlightened Eye (1991, 1998) - the extension of his thinking to qualitative research into education). He also made an important contribution to the school reform debate in North America especially through his book, The Kind of Schools We Need (1998). His examination of process and the artistry of education is of particular importance for the sphere of informal education (see Jeffs and Smith 2005). His work shares a number of important themes with John Dewey (on experience, creativity, education and art), Donald Schön (on reflective practice) and Howard Gardner (around multiple intelligences).

Elliot Eisner has received various awards including the Palmer O. Johnson Memorial Award (from the American Educational Research Association), a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship and five honorary degrees. Eisner has also served as president of the

National Art Education Association, the International Society for Education through Art, the American Research Association, and the John Dewey Society.

Elliot W. Eisner - career

Born in 1933 Elliot Eisner grew up in the west side of Chicago. He looked set for some sort of career in art. From early in his schooling he displayed considerable talent and this was encouraged by his mother - who hoped he might be a commercial artist (Uhrmacher 2001: 247). He studied at Roosevelt University, Chicago (gaining a  BA in Art & Education in 1954). P Bruce Uhrmacher reports that while in college Elliot Eisner worked with African American boys in the American Boys Commonwealth in the neighbourhood where he grew up).  His focus moved from art as such to art education. He completed an MS (Art Education) at Illinois Institute of Technology in 1955; an MA (Education) at the University of Chicago in 1958; and a PhD in Education at the University of Chicago in 1962.

Eisner worked as a high school art teacher in Chicago (1956-1958); an art teacher at the University of Chicago (1958-1960); an instructor in art education at Ohio State University (1960-1961); and an instructor in education, University of Chicago (1961-1962). He became an assistant professor of education at the University of Chicago in 1962. In 1965 he joined the faculty at Stanford - first as an associate professor of education and art (1965-1970); and then from 1970 on as a professor of education and art.

Art

From an early point in his career Elliot Eisner was worried that most schools, by failing to properly appreciate the significance of art, were offering an unnecessarily narrow and seriously unbalanced approach to education. Moreover, he began to recognize that many of the then current conceptions of cognition - because they lacked proper attention to artistic modes of thinking - were inadequate (Uhrmacher 2001: 247). Later, Howard Gardner, was to make a similar point within his argument for attention to 'multiple intelligences'. Elliot W. Eisner made the case for developing a proper attention to the cognitive in art rather than it being only driven by emotional and what were termed 'creative' forces. Uhrmacher (2001: 248) comments that Eisner 'stressed that environment shapes artistic attitudes and that art education has unique contributions to make to growing children'. Eisner was also to argue strongly for a concern for the critical and aesthetic in art education (see below) - and for a better exploration of historical context. He was later to argue that approaches which simply gave children arts materials in the hope that their creativity might flow resulted in programmes 'with little or no structure, limited artistic content, , and few meaningful aims' (Eisner 1988). Uhrmacher judges that 'in large measure due to Eisner's advocacy, art education has become a content-oriented discipline.

Part of the reason for Elliot W. Eisner's influence has been his involvement in key projects and initiatives. These include the Kettering Project (begun in 1967) providing curriculum materials for new and untrained elementary teachers (and based around his theories) and the Getty Center for Education in the Arts (he served on the advisory board from 1982 on). The Getty Center is well known for its advocacy of what has become known as 'discipline-based art education' (DBAE) (see Alexander and Day 1992). DBAE also had it roots in Harry Broudy's advocacy of

aesthetic education during the 1950s. It emphasizes four main content areas (disciplines): art production, art history, art criticism and aesthetic enquiry.  

A further element in Elliot Eisner's influence has been his obvious enthusiasm for the artistic activity of others. Both he and his wife Ellie are known for their support of the arts.

Artistry

A further, important, strand to Elliot W. Eisner's work has been his interest in educational work as artistry. Viewing education work as an expression of artistry allows us to look beyond the technical and to develop more creative and appropriate responses to the situations that educators and learners encounter. In this activity Eisner shares much with Donald Schön and his advocacy of alternative approaches to viewing the way that professionals 'think in action' (1988). When we listen to other educators, for example in team meetings, or have the chance to observe them in action, we inevitably form judgments about their ability. At one level, for example, we might be impressed by someone's knowledge of the benefit system or of the effects of different drugs. However, such knowledge is useless if it cannot be used in the best way. We may be informed and be able to draw on a range of techniques, yet the thing that makes educators special is the way in which they are able to combine these and improvise regarding the particular situation. In so doing they also draw on an idea of what might be good or make for flourishing (see Jeffs and Smith 1990). It is this quality that can be described as artistry. It involves a shift from a focus on technique to one more focused around praxis (see the discussion of curriculum).

Artistry, therefore, can serve as a regulative ideal for education, a vision that adumbrates what really matters in schools. To conceive of students as artists who do their art in science, in the arts, or the humanities, is, after all, both a daunting and a profound aspiration. It may be that by shifting the paradigm of education reform and teaching from one modeled after the clocklike character of the assembly line into one that is closer to the studio or innovative science laboratory might provide us with a vision that better suits the capacities and the futures of the students we teach. It is in this sense, I believe, that the field of education has much to learn from the arts about the practice of education. It is time to embrace a new model for improving our schools. (Eisner 2004)

Eisner's belief that education had much to learn from the arts naturally led to the his exploration of the significance of aesthetic judgement and critique - and his attention to these (particularly in The Art of Educational Evaluation and later in The Enlightened Eye) has found an appreciative audience among who find the formulaic and technical orientation of current, dominant approaches to curriculum activity and education work wanting.

Elliot W. Eisner on connoisseurship and criticism

One of the great benefits of Elliot W. Eisner's  activities has been the way in which he has both made the case for a concern with connoisseurship and criticism, and mediated these concerns for educators and researchers. The importance of of his advocacy of these ideas cannot be underestimated - especially at a time when rather narrow concerns with instrumental outcomes

and an orientation to the technical dominate. Together they offer educators a more helpful and appropriate means to approach evaluation, for example.

Elliot W. Eisner describes connoisseurship as follows:

Connoisseurship is the art of appreciation. It can be displayed in any realm in which the character, import, or value of objects, situations, and performances id distributed and variable, including educational practice. (Eisner 1998: 63)

The word connoisseurship comes from the Latin cognoscere, to know (Eisner 1998: 6). It involves the ability to see, not merely to look. To do this we have to develop the ability to name and appreciate the different dimensions of situations and experiences, and the way they relate one to another. We have to be able to draw upon, and make use of, a wide array of information. We also have to be able to place our experiences and understandings in a wider context, and connect them with our values and commitments. Connoisseurship is something that needs to be worked at – but it is not a technical exercise. The bringing together of the different elements into a whole involves artistry.

However, educators need to become something more than connoisseurs. They need to become critics.

If connoisseurship is the art of appreciation, criticism is the art of disclosure. Criticism, as Dewey pointed out in Art as Experience, has at is end the re-education of perception... The task of the critic is to help us to see.

Thus…  connoisseurship provides criticism with its subject matter. Connoisseurship is private, but criticism is public. Connoisseurs simply need to appreciate what they encounter. Critics, however, must render these qualities vivid by the artful use of critical disclosure. (Eisner 1985: 92-93)

Criticism can be approached as the process of enabling others to see the qualities of something. As Eisner (1998: 6) puts it, ‘effective criticism functions as the midwife to perception. It helps it come into being, then later refines it and helps it to become more acute’. The significance of this for those who want to be educators is, thus, clear. Educators also need to develop the ability to work with others so that they may discover the truth in situations, experiences and phenomenon.

Knowledge

Elliot W. Eisner's work around cognition - Cognition and Curriculum (first published in 1982) revisited and developed in 1994) - has become a significant reference point in debates around teaching and curriculum making in the United States (and to some extent in the UK as well). Perhaps best described as a 'cognitive pluralist' Eisner argues that cognition frequently approached as a phenomenon that deals with knowing rather than feeling. For Elliot Eisner, knowledge cannot be just a verbal construct (and constrained by the structures of language). Rather, as Lloyd-Zannini (1998) has put it (after Eisner) 'knowledge is an intensely variable and personal "event", something acquired via a combination of one's senses - visual, auditory, tactile,

olfactory, gustatory - assembled according to a personal schema, and then made public - expressed, typically, by the same sensory modalities utilized in the initial acquisition'.

The key to developing knowledge within schooling and other educational settings (such as the family) is to create a varied and stimulating environment in which people become 'immersed'. Educators also need to encourage people to try make meaning; to 'read' (or conceptualize) the situation.  This they do by constructing images 'derived from the material the senses provide'  and refining 'the senses [as] a primary means for expanding...[one's own] consciousness' (Eisner 1994 28-9). People need access to the experience of different forms of representation or symbol systems. Trying to make sense of these, being encouraged to draw upon them and play with them, nurtures the imagination and allows people to be more creative in their responses to the situations in which they find themselves. 'When we define the curriculum, we are also defining the opportunities the young will have to experience different forms of consciousness' (Eisner 1994: 44). Eisner, like John Dewey,  is clear that our ability to know is based in our ability to construct meaning from experiences.

School reform - Elliot W. Eisner's contribution

Uhrmacher (2001: 250) has helpfully adumbrated Elliot W. Eisner's contribution to school reform around three major poles:

Advocating moving beyond technocratic and behaviouristic modes of thinking - and for having a concern for 'expressive outcomes'.

Calling to attend to fundamentals. Eisner has consistently warned against educational fads and fashion. He has criticized dominant paradigms and invited educators and others to ask questions such as 'what is basic in education?'.

Arguing that schools should help children create meaning from experience, and that this requires an education devoted to the senses, to meaning-making and the imagination. Eisner argues for a curriculum that fosters multiple 'literacies' in students (especially by looking to non-verbal modes of learning and expression) and a deepening of the 'artistry' of teachers.

Elliot W. Eisner (1998, 2004) has argued strongly for a shift in the emphasis and direction of schooling. He has commented that educators know experientially that context matters, 'indeed, context matters most in the "chemistry" that makes for educational effectiveness'.

Even to talk about effectiveness as though it were independent of the kind of intellectual values that schools ought to support, seems ill conceived. Thoughtful educators are not simply interested in achieving known effects; they are interested as much in surprise, in discovery, in the imaginative side of life and its development as in hitting predefined targets achieved through routine procedures. In some sense our aim ought to be to convert the school from an academic institution into an intellectual one. That shift in the culture of schooling would represent a profound shift in emphasis and in direction. (Eisner 2004)

Over the time that Eisner has been writing there have been significant shifts in the context in which schools have to operate. While there have been other voices calling for changes in the

culture of schooling (notably Howard Gardner in this arena), the impact of globalization, growing centralization in many schooling systems, reaction against more process-oriented forms of pedagogy, and a growing instrumentalism education have served to make Eisner's message both more pertinent to schools, and more difficult to respond to.

Elliot W. Eisner - an assessment

Here I want to begin by briefly turning to three areas of criticism that relate to some issues arising when bringing Eisner's thinking into the realm of educational practice.

First, there are some questions around the way in which Elliot Eisner's work around cognition (and art) has tended to be translated into a discipline-based, rather than a more child-centred and relational approached (as is arguably the case with Howard Gardner). In part, the appeal to discipline is linked to Eisner's concern with both connoisseurship and criticism. The later does lend itself to a location within particular tradition before critique and movement can be properly attempted - and this may have something to do with the adoption of the notion of 'discipline' as an organizing idea. This does not preclude, however, the adoption of 'project' ways of working as Elliot Eisner has demonstrated in Cognition and Curriculum Reconsidered.

Second, Elliot W. Eisner is asking educators to develop in particularly sophisticated ways. To be connoisseurs and critics - as Parker C. Palmer (1998)  has shown - they have to engage in a continuing exploration of themselves, others and their arena of practice. They have to be able to reflect-in- and -on-action, engage with feelings, and be able to make informed and committed judgements. Some would argue that many educators currently in practice are simply not up to this. Indeed, this was a case that Lawrence Stenhouse made with some force with regard to the difficulties that classroom teachers had with more process-oriented approaches to curriculum during the 1970s (see the article on curriculum theory and practice on these pages). However, it could be the issue here is less about the inherent ability of people to develop as connoisseurs and critics, and rather more about the quality of environments that organized educational systems afford both around the development of their staff and the resources and discretion they have in the classroom or learning environment.

Third, there will, inevitably, be criticism of Eisner's approach from those who have come to either view education as commodity or as something that should be approached as a product. Unfortunately, it is they who dominate the agendas of many educational systems today (see, for example, the article on globalization and education on these pages). Those who want to reduce education to training; constrain exploration by specifying preset outcomes; and focus on what can be accredited rather than experienced and learnt, will have profound difficulties in approaching Elliot W. Eisner's work in any meaningful way. For to work in this way entails entering into what Erich Fromm (1976) called 'being' rather than a 'having' orientation to the world. It involves approaching education in a completely different frame of mind - and as Donald Schön and others have shown this is an exercise fraught with difficulty.

P. Bruce Uhrmacher has commented that Eisner has striven not merely to infuse education with art, 'but to make art central to the mission of schools' (2001: 250). He quotes from The Kind of Schools We Need:

The arts inform as well as stimulate, they challenge as well as satisfy. Their location is not limited to galleries, concert halls and theatres. Their home can be found wherever humans chose to have attentive and vita intercourse with life itself. This is, perhaps, the largest lesson that the arts in education can teach, the lesson that life itself can be led as a work of art. In so doing the maker himself or herself is remade. The remaking, this re-creation is at the heart of the process of education. (Eisner 1998: 56)

Elliot W. Eisner's contribution has been both to highlight, again, the importance of art and artistry in education (and research) - and to bring some significant insights into the process of remaking and re-creation that is education.

Further reading and bibliography

Alexander, Kay and Day, Michael (eds.) (1992) Discipline-based Art Education. A curriculum sampler, New York: Oxford University Press.

Eisner, Elliot W., and David W. Ecker (1966) Readings in art education, Waltham, Mass.,: Blaisdell Pub. Co.

Eisner, Elliot W. (1971) Confronting curriculum reform, Boston,: Little Brown.

Eisner, Elliot W. (1972) Educating artistic vision, New York,: Macmillan.

Eisner, Elliot W. and Vallance, Elizabeth (1974) Conflicting conceptions of curriculum, Berkeley, Calif.,: McCutchan Pub. Corp.

Eisner, Elliot W. (1979, 1985, 1994) The educational imagination: on the design and evaluation of school programs. New York: Macmillan.

Eisner, Elliot W. (1982) Cognition and curriculum : a basis for deciding what to teach, New York: Longman.

Eisner, Elliot W. (1985) The art of educational evaluation: a personal view. London: : Falmer Press.

Eisner, Elliot W. (1988) The role of Discipline-Based Art Education in American Schools, Los Angeles: Paul Getty Trust.

Eisner, Elliot W., and Peshkin, Alan (1990)Qualitative inquiry in education : the continuing debate, New York: Teachers College Press.

Eisner, Elliot W. (1991) The enlightened eye : qualitative inquiry and the enhancement of educational practice. New York: Macmillan.

Eisner, Elliot W. (1994) Cognition and curriculum reconsidered, 2e, New York: Teachers College Press.

Eisner, Elliot W. (1998) The enlightened eye : qualitative inquiry and the enhancement of educational practice. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Merrill, 1998.

Eisner, Elliot W. (1998) The kind of schools we need : personal essays, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Eisner, Elliot W. (2004) 'Artistry in teaching', Cultural Commons, http://www.culturalcommons.org/eisner.htm. Accessed: February 11, 2005.

Fromm, Erich (1976) To Have or to Be, 1979 edn. London: Abacus.

Jeffs, Tony and Smith, Mark K. (2005) Informal Education. Conversation, learning and democracy 3e., Derby: Educational Heretics Press.

Lloyd-Zannini, L. P. (1998) 'A review of Elliot Eisner's Cognition and curriculum reconsidered', Gifted Child Quarterly, 42 (1), 63-64.

Palmer, Parker C. (1998) The Courage To Teach, Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life, San Francisco, California: Jossey-Bass.

Schön, Donald (1983) The Reflective Practitioner. How professionals think in action, London: Temple Smith.

Stenhouse, Lawrence (1975) An introduction to Curriculum Research and Development, London: Heineman.

Uhrmacher, P. Bruce (2001) 'Elliot Eisner' in J. A. Palmer (ed.) Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education. From Piaget to the present, London: Routledge.

Links

What can education learn from the arts about the practice of education? Elliot W. Eisner argues that the distinctive forms of thinking needed to create artistically crafted work are relevant not only to what students do, they are relevant to virtually all aspects of what we do, from the design of curricula, to the practice of teaching, to the features of the environment in which students and teachers live. [Originally given as the John Dewey Lecture for 2002, Stanford University.]

See, on these pages, Howard Garner, Donald Sch ön , John Dewey, curriculum theory, and globalization.

How to cite this article: Smith, M. K. (2005) 'Elliot W. Eisner, connoisseurship, criticism and the art of education', the encyclopaedia of informal education, www.infed.org/thinkers/eisner.htm.

A SPEECH BY EISNER HIMSELF!

What can education learn from the arts about the practice of education?

Elliot W. Eisner argues that the distinctive forms of thinking needed to create artistically crafted work are relevant not only to what students do, they are relevant to virtually all aspects of what we do, from the design of curricula, to the practice of teaching, to the features of the environment in which students and teachers live. [Originally given as the John Dewey Lecture for 2002, Stanford University.] contents: introduction · the development of a technicized, cognitive culture · artistically rooted forms of intelligence · the creation of a new culture of schooling · conclusion · further reading and bibliography · links · how to cite this article

see, also, elliot w. eisner, connoisseurship, criticism and the art of education

Before I begin my remarks I want to express my gratitude to the Dewey Society for inviting me to deliver this address. It’s the third time I have been asked to do so. The first invitation came from the University of Chicago in 1976, the second from the Dewey Society in 1979 and the third this year. I regard the invitation as both a pleasure and a privilege. For both the pleasure and the privilege I thank you.

I want to talk with you today about what education might learn from the arts about the practice of education. In many ways the idea that education has something to learn from the arts cuts across the grain of our traditional beliefs about how to improve educational practice.

Our field, the field of education, has predicated its practices on a platform of scientifically grounded knowledge, at least as an aspiration. The arts and artistry as sources of improved educational practice are considered, at best, a fall back position, a court of last resort, something you retreat to when there is no science to provide guidance. It is widely believed that no field seeking professional respectability can depend on such an undependable source.

Despite prevailing doubts I intend to examine what a conception of practice rooted in the arts might contribute to the improvement of both the means and ends of education. What I want to do is to foreshadow the grounds for a view of education that differs in fundamental ways from the one that now prevails. To do this I will be describing the forms thinking the arts evoke and their relevance for re-framing our conception of what education might try to accomplish.  To secure a perspective for the analysis, let’s first look at the historical context within which our current assumptions about reliable and effective practice have been based.

The development of a technicized cognitive culture

As we know when, in the fourth quarter of the 19th century, education was coming into its own as a field of study it received its initial guidance from psychology. It was the early psychologists who were interested in making psychology a scientific enterprise, one that emulated the work done in the so-called “hard sciences.” Their aim was to develop a physics of psychology; what they called psychophysics and, consistent with their mission, made laboratories rather than studios the venues for their work.[1]  People like Galton in England and Helmholtz and Fechner in Germany were among its leaders and even William James, Charles Spearman, and G. Stanley Hall made passage to Europe to learn the secrets and methods of those seeking to create a science of mind. One example of the faith placed in a science of psychology can be found in Edward L. Thorndike’s 1910 lead article in the Journal of Educational Psychology. He writes:

A complete science of psychology would tell every fact about everyone’s intellect and character and behavior, would tell the cause of every change in human nature, would tell the result of every educational force--every act of every person that changed any other or the person himself--would have. It would aid us to use human beings for the world’s welfare with the same surety of the result that we now have when we use falling bodies or chemical elements. In proportion as we get such a science we shall become the masters of our own souls as we now are masters of heat and light. Progress toward such a science is being made. [2]

Thorndike’s optimism was not shared by all. James and Dewey, for example, had reservations regarding what science could provide to so artful an enterprise as teaching. Never-the-less, by the end of the first quarter of the 20th century the die was cast. Except for some independent schools, Thorndike won and Dewey lost.[3] Metaphorically speaking, schools were to become effective and efficient manufacturing plants. Indeed, the language of manufacture was a part of the active vocabulary of Thorndike, Taylor, Cubberly and others in the social efficiency movement. In their vision of education students were raw material to be processed according to specifications prescribed by supervisors trained in Fredrick Taylor’s time and motion study.[4]

I suspect that even teachers working during the first quarter of the 20th century could not be coaxed into employing wholeheartedly the Taylorisms that were prescribed. Yet for many, especially for those in school administration, the managed and hyper-rationalized educational world that Fredrick Taylor envisioned became the methodological ideal needed to create effective and efficient schools.[5]

The influence of psychology on education had another fall-out. In the process science and art became estranged. Science was considered dependable, the artistic process was not. Science was

cognitive, the arts were emotional. Science was teachable, the arts required talent. Science was testable, the arts were matters of preference. Science was useful and the arts were ornamental.  It was clear to many then as it is to many today which side of the coin mattered. As I said, one relied on art when there was no science to provide guidance. Art was a fall-back position.

These beliefs and the vision of education they adumbrate are not altogether alien to the contemporary scene. We live at time that puts a premium on the measurement of outcomes, on the ability to predict them, and on the need to be absolutely clear about what we want to accomplish. To aspire for less is to court professional irresponsibility.  We like our data hard and our methods stiff—we call it rigor.

From a social perspective it is understandable why tight controls, accountability in terms of high stakes testing, and the pre-specification of intended outcomes—standards they are called—should have such attractiveness. When the public is concerned about the educational productivity of its schools the tendency, and it is a strong one, is to tighten up, to mandate, to measure, and to manage. The teacher’s ability to exercise professional discretion is likely to be constrained when the public has lost confidence in its schools.

It does not require a great leap of imagination or profound insight to recognize that the values and visions that have driven education during the first quarter of the 20th century are reappearing with a vengeance today. We look for “best methods” as if they were independent of context; we do more testing than any nation on earth; we seek curriculum uniformity so parents can compare their schools with other schools, as if test scores were good proxies for the quality of education. We would like nothing more than to get teaching down to a science even though the conception of science being employed has little to do with what science is about. What we are now doing is creating an industrial culture in our schools, one whose values are brittle and whose conception of what’s important narrow. We flirt with payment by results, we pay practically no attention to the idea that engagement in school can and should provide intrinsic satisfactions, and we exacerbate the importance of extrinsic rewards by creating policies that encourage children to become point collectors. Achievement has triumphed over inquiry. I think our children deserve more.

The technically rationalized industrial culture I speak of did not begin with psychology; it began with the Enlightenment. The move by Galileo from attention to the qualitative to a focus on the quantification of relationships was, as Dewey points out, not merely a modification in method; it was a conceptual revolution.[6] It represented a fundamental shift in the way the world was viewed and represented. According to philosopher and historian of science Stephen Toulmin the shift was from attention to the timely to attention to the timeless, from an emphasis on the oral to an emphasis on the written, from attention to the particular to the pursuit of the universal.[7]

The calculation of relations and the search for order represented the highest expression of our rationality. The ability to use what one learned about nature in order to harness it to our will was another. Rationality during the Enlightenment was closer in spirit to the proportions of the Parthanon than to the expressive contours of the Sistine ceiling. This search for order, this desire for efficiency, this need to control and predict were then and are dominant values today. They are values that pervaded the industrial revolution and they are values that reside tacitly beneath

current efforts at school reform. Current educational policy expressed in President Bush’s 26 billion dollar educational reform agenda is an effort to create order, to tidy up a complex system, to harness nature, so to speak, so that our intentions can be efficiently realized.

There is of course virtue in having intentions and the ability to realize them. What is troublesome is the push towards uniformity, uniformity in aims, uniformity in content, uniformity in assessment, uniformity in expectation. Of course for technocrats uniformity is a blessing; it gets rid of complications—or so it is believed. Statistics can be a comfort; they abstract the particular out of existence. For example, we comfort ourselves in the belief that we are able to describe just what every fourth grader should know and be able to do by the time they leave the fourth grade. To do this we reify an image of an average fourth grader. Of course very few policy makers have ever visited Ms. Purtle’s fourth grade classroom where they might encounter red headed Mickey Malone. Mickey is no statistic. As I said particulars like Mickey Malone complicate life, but they also enrich it.

The point of my remarks thus far is to identify the roots of the increasingly technicized cognitive culture in which we operate. This culture is so ubiquitous we hardly see it. And it is so powerful that even when we do recognize it too few of us say anything. What President Bush has said about our students also applies to us: When the bandwagon starts rolling we too don’t want to be left behind.

As you can tell I am not thrilled with the array of values and assumptions that drive our pursuit of improved schools. I am not sure we can tinker towards Utopia and get there. Nor do I believe we can mount a revolution. What we can do is to generate other visions of education, other values to guide its realization, other assumptions on which a more generous conception of the practice of schooling can be built. That is, although I do not think revolution is an option, ideas that inspire new visions, values, and especially new practices are. It is one such vision, one that cuts across the grain, that I wish to explore with you today.

The contours of this new vision were influenced by the ideas of Sir Herbert Read, an English art historian, poet, and pacifist working during the middle of the last century.[8] He argued and I concur that the aim of education ought to be conceived of as the preparation of artists. By the term artist neither he nor I mean necessarily painters and dancers, poets and playwrights. We mean individuals who have developed the ideas, the sensibilities, the skills, and the imagination to create work that is well proportioned, skilfully executed, and imaginative, regardless of the domain in which an individual works. The highest accolade we can confer upon someone is to say that he or she is an artist whether as a carpenter or a surgeon, a cook or an engineer, a physicist or a teacher. The fine arts have no monopoly on the artistic.

I further want to argue that the distinctive forms of thinking needed to create artistically crafted work are relevant not only to what students do, they are relevant to virtually all aspects of what we do, from the design of curricula, to the practice of teaching, to the features of the environment in which students and teachers live.

Artistically rooted forms of intelligence

What are these distinctive forms of thinking, these artistically rooted qualitative forms of intelligence? Let me describe six of them for you and the way they might play out in school.

1. Experiencing qualitative relationships and making judgements

Consider first the task of working on a painting, a poem, a musical score. That task requires, perhaps above all else, the ability to compose qualitative relationships that satisfy some purpose. That is, what a composer composes are relationships among a virtually infinite number of possible sound patterns. A painter has a similar task. The medium and sensory modality differ but the business of composing relationships remains. To succeed the artist needs to see, that is, to experience the qualitative relationships that emerge in his or her work and to make judgments about them. 

Making judgments about how qualities are to be organized does not depend upon fealty to some formula; there is nothing in the artistic treatment of a composition like the making and matching activity in learning to spell or learning to use algorithms to prove basic arithmetic operations. In spelling and in arithmetic there are correct answers, answers whose correctness can be proven. In the arts judgments are made in the absence of rule. Of course there are styles of work that do serve as models for work in the various arts but what constitutes the right qualitative relationships for any particular work is idiosyncratic to the particular work. The temperature of a color might be a tad too warm, the edge of a shape might be a bit too sharp, the percussion might need to be a little more dynamic. What the arts teach is that attention to such matters matter. The arts teach students to act and to judge in the absence of rule, to rely on feel, to pay attention to nuance, to act and appraise the consequences of one’s choices and to revise and then to make other choices. Getting these relationships right requires what Nelson Goodman calls “rightness of fit.”[9] Artists and all who work with the composition of qualities try to achieve a “rightness of fit.”

Given the absence of a formula or an algorithm, how are judgments about rightness made? I believe they depend upon somatic knowledge, the sense of closure that the good gestalt engenders in embodied experience; the composition feels right. Work in the arts cultivates the modes of thinking and feeling that I have described; one cannot succeed in the arts without such cognitive abilities. Such forms of thought integrate feeling and thinking in ways that make them inseparable. One knows one is right because one feels the relationships. One modifies one’s work and feels the results. The sensibilities come into play and in the process become refined.  Another way of putting it is that as we learn in and through the arts we become more qualitatively intelligent.

Learning to pay attention to the way in which form is configured is a mode of thought that can be applied to all things made, theoretical or practical.  How a story is composed in the context of the language arts, how an historian composes her argument, how a scientific theory is constructed, all of these forms of human creation profit from attention to the way the elements that constitute them are configured. We need to help students learn to ask not only what someone is saying, but how someone has constructed an argument, a musical score, or a visual image. Curriculum

activities can be designed that call attention to such matters, activities that refine perception in each of the fields we teach. This will require activities that slow down perception rather than speed it up.          

Much of our perception, perhaps most of it, is highly focal. We tend to look for particular things in our perceptual field.  The virtue of such a mode of attention is that it enables us to find what we are looking for. The potential vice of such perception is that it impedes our awareness of relationships.  The up and back movement of the visitor to the art gallery when looking at a painting is an example of an effort to secure both focal awareness and attention to configuration. Teachers perform similar activities. One of the important tasks of teaching is to be able to focus on the individual while attending to the larger classroom patterns of which the individual is a part. To complicate matters these patterns change over time. The good teacher, like the good short order cook, has to pay attention to several operations simultaneously, and they do.

2. Flexible purposing

A second lesson that education can learn from the arts pertains to the formulation of aims. In western models of rational decision-making the formulation of aims, goals, objectives, or standards is a critical act; virtually all else that follows depends upon the belief that one must have  clearly defined ends: Once ends are conceptualized means are formulated, then implemented, and then outcomes are evaluated. If there is a discrepancy between aspiration and accomplishment, new means are formulated. The cycle continues until  xz ends and outcomes are isomorphic. Ends are held constant and always are believed to precede means.

But is this true? In the arts it certainly is not. In the arts ends may follow means. One may act and the act may itself suggest ends, ends that did not precede the act, but follow it. In this process ends shift; the work yields clues that one pursues. In a sense, one surrenders to what the work in process suggests. This process of shifting aims while doing the work at hand is what Dewey called “flexible purposing.”[10] Flexible purposing is opportunistic; it capitalizes on the emergent features appearing within a field of relationships. It is not rigidly attached to predefined aims when the possibility of better ones emerge. The kind of thinking that flexible purposing requires thrives best in an environment in which the rigid adherence to a plan is not a necessity. As experienced teachers well know, the surest road to hell in a classroom is to stick to the lesson plan no matter what.

The pursuit, or at least the exploitation of surprise in an age of accountability is paradoxical.  As I indicated earlier, we place a much greater emphasis on prediction and control than on exploration and discovery.  Our inclination to control and predict is, at a practical level, understandable, but it also exacts a price; we tend to do the things we know how to predict and control.  Opening oneself to the uncertain is not a pervasive quality of our current educational environment.  I believe that it needs to be among the values we cherish. Uncertainty needs to have its proper place in the kinds of schools we create.

How can the pursuit of surprise be promoted in a classroom? What kind of classroom culture is needed? How can we help our students view their work as temporary experimental

accomplishments, tentative resting places subject to further change? How can we help them work at the edge of incompetence? These are some the questions that this aim suggests we ask.

3. Form and content is most often inextricable

A third lesson the arts can teach education is that form and content is most often inextricable. How something is said is part and parcel of what is said. The message is in the form-content relationship, a relationship that is most vivid in the arts. To recognize the relationship of form and content in the arts is not to deny that for some operations in some fields form and content can be separated. I think of beginning arithmetic, say the addition of two numbers such as 4+ 4. The sum of the numerals 4+4 can be expressed in literally an infinite number of ways: 8, eight, ////  ////, VIII, 300,000- 299,992 and so forth. In all of these examples the arithmetic conclusion, 8, is the same regardless of the form used to represent it. But for most of what we do form-content relations do matter. How history is written matters, how one speaks to a child matters, what a classroom looks like matters, how one tells a story matters. Getting it right means creating a form whose content is right for some purpose. The architecture of a school can look and feel like a factory or like a home. If we want children to feel like factory workers our schools should look and feel like factories. Form and content matter and in such cases are inseparable.

Indeed, the discovery that form and content are inseparable is one of the lessons the arts teach most profoundly. Change the cadence in a line of poetry and you change the poem’s meaning. The creation of expressive and satisfying relationships is what artistically guided work celebrates.

In the arts there is no substitutability among elements (because there are no separate elements), in math there is. The absence of substitutability promotes attention to the particular. Developing an awareness of the particular is especially important for those of us who teach since the distinctive character of how we teach is a pervasive aspect of what we teach. The current reform movement would do well to pay more attention to the messages its policies send to students since those messages may undermine deeper educational values. The values about which I speak include the promotion of self initiated learning, the pursuit of alternative possibilities, and the anticipation of intrinsic satisfactions secured through the use of the mind. Do we really believe that league tables published in the newspaper displaying school performance is a good way to understand what schools teach or that the relentless focus on raising test scores is a good way to insure quality education? The form we use to display data shapes its meaning.

4. Not everything knowable can be articulated in propositional form

Closely related to the form-content relationship is a fourth lesson the arts can teach education. It is this. Not everything knowable can be articulated in propositional form. The limits of our cognition are not defined by the limits of our language. We have a long philosophic tradition in the West that promotes the view that knowing anything requires some formulation of what we know in words; we need to have warrants for our assertions. But is it really the case that what we cannot assert we cannot know? Not according to Michael Polanyi who speaks of tacit knowledge and says “We know more than we can tell.”[11] And Dewey tells us that while science states

meaning, the arts express meaning. Meaning is not limited to what is assertable. Dewey goes on to say that that the aesthetic cannot be separated from the intellectual for the intellectual to be complete it must bear the stamp of the aesthetic.  Having a nose for telling questions and a feel for incisive answers are not empty metaphors.

These ideas not only expand our conception of the ways in which we know, they expand our conception of mind. They point to the cognitive frontiers that our teaching might explore. How can we help students recognize the ways in which we express and recover meaning, not only in the arts but in the sciences as well? How can we introduce them to the art of doing science? After all, the practice of any practice, including science, can be an art.

It’s clear to virtually everyone that we appeal to expressive form to say what literal language can never say. We build shrines to express our gratitude to the heroes of 9/11 because somehow we find our words inadequate. We appeal to poetry when we bury and when we marry. We situate our most profound religious practices within compositions we have choreographed. What does our need for such practices say to us about the sources of our understanding and what do they mean for how we educate? At a time when we seem to want to package performance into standardized measurable skill sets questions such as these seem to me to be especially important. The more we feel the pressure to standardize, the more we need to remind ourselves of what we should not try to standardize. 

5. Looking to the medium

A fifth lesson we can learn from the arts about the practice of education pertains to the relationship between thinking and the material with which we and our students work. In the arts it is plain that in order for a work to be created we must think within the constraints and affordances of the medium we elect to use. The flute makes certain qualities possible that the bass fiddle will never produce, and vice versa. Painting with watercolor makes certain visual qualities possible that cannot be created with oil paint. The artist’s task is to exploit the possibilities of the medium in order to realize aims he or she values. Each material imposes its own distinctive demands and to use it well we have to learn to think within it.

Where are the parallels when we teach and when students learn in the social studies, in the sciences, in the language arts? How must language and image be treated to say what we want to say? How must a medium be treated for the medium to mediate? How do we help students get smart with the media they are invited to use and what are the cognitive demands that different media make upon those who use them. Carving a sculpture out of a piece of wood is clearly a different cognitive task than building a sculpture out of plasticine clay. The former is a subtractive task, the latter an additive one. Getting smart in any domain requires at the very least learning to think within a medium. What are the varieties of media we help children get smart about? What do we neglect?

It seems to me that the computer has a particularly promising role to play in providing students with opportunities to learn how to think in new ways.  Assuming the programs can be developed, and it is my impression that many already have, operations are performable on the computer that cannot be executed through any other medium.  New possibilities for matters of representation

can stimulate our imaginative capacities and can generate forms of experience that would otherwise not exist.  Indeed, the history of art itself is, in large measure, a history studded with the effects of new technologies.  This has been at no time more visible than during the 20th century.  Artists have learned to think within materials such as neon tubing and plastic, day glow color and corfam steel, materials that make forms possible that Leonardo daVinci himself could not have conceived of.  Each new material offers us new affordances and constraints and in the process develops the ways in which we think. There is a lesson to be learned here for the ways in which we design curricula and the sorts of materials we make it possible for students to work with.

Decisions we make about such matters have a great deal to do with the kinds of minds we develop in school. Minds, unlike brains, are not entirely given at birth; minds are also forms of cultural achievement. The kinds of minds we develop are profoundly influenced by the opportunities to learn that the school provides. And this is the point of my remarks about what education might learn from the arts. The kinds of thinking I have described, and it is only a sample, represents the kind of thinking I believe schools should promote. The promotion of such thinking requires not only a shift in perspective regarding our educational aims, it represents a shift in the kind of tasks we invite students to undertake, the kind of thinking we ask them to do, and the kind of criteria we apply to appraise both their work and ours. Artistry, in other words, can be fostered by how we design the environments we inhabit. The lessons the arts teach are not only for our students, they are for us as well.

Winston Churchill once said that first we design our buildings and then our buildings design us. To paraphrase  Churchill  we can say, first we design our curriculum then our curriculum designs us. What I think many of us want is not only a form of educational practice whose features, so to speak, “design us,” but a form of educational practice that enables students to learn how to design themselves. Thus it might be said that at its best education is a process of learning how to become the architect of our own education. It is a process that does not terminate until we do.

6. The aesthetic satisfactions that the work itself makes possible

Finally, we come to motives for engagement. In the arts motives tend to be secured from the aesthetic satisfactions that the work itself makes possible. A part of these satisfactions is related to the challenge that the work presents; materials resist the maker, they have to be crafted and this requires an intense focus on the modulation of forms as they emerge in a material being processed. This focus is often so intense that all sense of time is lost. The work and the worker become one. At times it is the tactile quality of the medium that matters, its feel, the giving and resisting quality of the clay. At other times it is the changing relationships among fields of color. The arts, in a sense, are supermarkets for the senses. But the arts are far more than supermarkets for sensory gourmets. In the arts there is an idea which the work embodies. For the impressionists the idea was light, for the surrealists it was the unconscious, for the cubists it was time and space, for the American regionalists of the 1930's it was the ordinary lives of ordinary people that was celebrated. These interests provided direction to the work but the quality of the work was always appraised by what it did within experience.

The arts are, in the end, a special form of experience, but if there is any point I wish to emphasize it is that the experience the arts make possible is not restricted to what we call the fine arts. The sense of vitality and the surge of emotion we feel when touched by one of the arts can also be secured in the ideas we explore with students, in the challenges we encounter in doing critical inquiry, and in the appetite for learning we stimulate. In the long run these are the satisfactions that matter most because they are the only ones that insure, if it can be insured at all, that what we teach students will want to pursue voluntarily after the artificial incentives so ubiquitous in our schools are long forgotten. It is in this sense especially that the arts can serve as a model for education.

The agenda I have proposed gives rise to more than a few questions. One is whether a conception of education that uses art as its regulative ideal is realistic? Is it asking for too much? My answer is that ideals are always out of reach. It is no different for education’s ideals. The arts provide the kind of ideal that I believe American education needs now more than ever. I say now more than ever because our lives increasingly require the ability to deal with conflicting messages, to make judgements in the absence of rule, to cope with ambiguity, and to frame imaginative solutions to the problems we face. Our world is not one that submits to single correct answers to questions or clear cut solutions to problems; consider what’s going on in the Middle East. We need to be able not only to envision fresh options, we need to have feel for the situations in which they appear. In a word, the forms of thinking the arts stimulate and develop are far more appropriate for the real world we live in than the tidy right angled boxes we employ in our schools in the name of school improvement.

The creation of a new culture of schooling

This brings us to the final portion of my remarks. Thus far I have tried to describe my concerns about our current efforts to use highly rationalized standardized procedures to reform education and to describe their historical roots. I then advanced the notion that genuine change depends upon a vision of education that is fundamentally different from the one that guides today’s efforts at school reform. I proposed that education might well consider thinking about the aim of education as the preparation of artists and I proceeded to describe the modes of thinking the arts evoke, develop and refine. These forms of thinking, as I indicated earlier, relate to relationships that when acted upon require judgment in the absence of rule, they encourage students and teachers to be flexibly purposive; (its O.K. for aims to shift in process), they recognize the unity of form and content, they require one to think within the affordances and constraints of the medium one elects to use and they emphasize the importance of aesthetic satisfactions as motives for work. In addition, I alluded to some of the locations in the context of schooling in which those forms of thinking might be developed.

In describing some of the forms of thinking the arts occasion, of necessity I had to fragment what is a seamless, unified process. I want therefore to emphasis here that I am not talking about the implementation of isolated curriculum activities, but rather, the creation of a new culture of schooling that has as much to do with the cultivation of dispositions as with the acquisition of skills.

At the risk of propagating dualisms, but in the service of emphasis, I am talking about a culture of schooling in which more importance is placed on exploration than on discovery, more value is assigned to surprise than to control, more attention is devoted to what is distinctive than to what is standard, more interest is related to what is metaphorical than to what is literal. It is an educational culture that has a greater focus on becoming than on being, places more value on the imaginative than on the factual, assigns greater priority to valuing than to measuring, and regards the quality of the journey as more educationally significant than the speed at which the destination is reached. I am talking about a new vision of what education might become and what schools are for.

Conclusion

I want to bring my remarks to a close by reminding all of us here that visions, no matter how grand, need to be acted upon to become real. Ideas, clearly, are important. Without them change has no rudder. But change also needs wind and a sail to catch it. Without them there is no movement. Frankly, this may be the most challenging aspect of the proposal I have made. The public’s perception of the purpose of education supports the current paradigm. We need to sail against the tide.

Our destination is to change the social vision of what schools can be. It will not be an easy journey but when the seas seem too treacherous to travel and the stars too distant to touch we should remember Robert Browning’s observation that “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for.”[12]

Browning gives us a moral message, one generated by the imagination and expressed through the poetic. And as Dewey said in the closing pages of Art as Experience,  “Imagination is the chief instrument of the good.” Dewey went on to say that, “Art has been the means of keeping alive the sense of purposes that outrun evidence and of meanings that transcend indurated habit.”[13]

Imagination is no mere ornament, nor is art. Together they can liberate us from our indurated habits. They might help us restore decent purpose to our efforts and help us create the kind of schools our children deserve and our culture needs. Those aspirations, my friends, are stars worth stretching for.

Further reading and bibliography

[1]. Edwin Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology, Third Edition. New York: Appleton Century Crofts, 1957.

[2] Edward L. Thorndike, “The Contribution of Psychology to Education”, Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol.. 1, 1910, pp. 6., 8.

[3] For a lucid story of research in education see Ellen Lagemann, An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Educational Research, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

[4]  Raymond Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962

[5]  ibid

[6]  Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, New York: The Free Press, 1990.

[7]  ibid

[8] Herbert Read, Education Through Art, London: Pantheon, 1944.

[9] Nelso Goodman. Ways of World-making, Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing, 1978.

[10] John Dewey, Experience and Education, New York,: Macmillan and Co. 1938.

[11] Michael Polyani, The Tacit Dimension, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967.

[12]  Robert Browning, “Andrea del Sarto, in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, Edited by Alexander Allison, et. al. New York: Norton, 1983.

[13] John Dewey, Art As Experience, New York: Minton Balch and Co. 1934. Pp.348.

Links

For an assessment of Eisner's work see: Elliot W. Eisner, connoisseurship, criticism and the art of education.

How to cite this article: Eisner, Elliot W. (2002) 'What can eduction learn from the arts about the practice of education?', the encyclopedia of informal education, www.infed.org/biblio/eisner_arts_and_the_practice_or_education.htm .

[The headings in this piece were added by infed.org and were not in the original.]

© Elliot W. Eisner 2002, 2005. Reproduced here with the permission of the author. 

Works by Elliot Eisner

Eisner, Elliot W., and David W. Ecker. Readings in art education A Blaisdell book in the humanities. Waltham, Mass.,: Blaisdell Pub. Co., 1966.

Eisner, Elliot W., and Stanford University. School of Education. A comparison of the developmental drawing characteristics of culturally advantaged and culturally disadvantaged children . Stanford, Calif.,: Stanford University, 1967.

Eisner, Elliot W., and Stanford University. Confronting curriculum reform. Boston,: Little Brown, 1971.

Eisner, Elliot W. Educating artistic vision . New York,: Macmillan, 1972.

Eisner, Elliot W., and Stanford University. Kettering Project. Stanford University Kettering Project curriculum in the visual arts productive for elementary school children . Honolulu,: Office of Instructional Services Dept. of Education State of Hawaii, 1972.

Eisner, Elliot W., and Elizabeth Vallance. Conflicting conceptions of curriculum Series on contemporary educational issues. Berkeley, Calif.,: McCutchan Pub. Corp., 1974.

Eisner, Elliot W. English primary schools : some observations and assessments . Washington: National Association for the Education of Young Children, 1974.

Eisner, Elliot W. The Arts, human development, and education. Berkeley, Calif.: McCutchan Pub. Corp., 1976.

Eisner, Elliot W. The educational imagination : on the design and evaluation of school programs. New York: Macmillan, 1979.

Eisner, Elliot W. Cognition and curriculum : a basis for deciding what to teach The John Dewey Society lecture series ; no. 18, 1981. New York: Longman, 1982.

Eisner, Elliot W. The educational imagination : on the design and evaluation of school programs . 2nd ed. New York London: Macmillan; Collier Macmillan, 1985.

Eisner, Elliot W. The art of educational evaluation : a personal view. London ; Philadelphia: Falmer Press, 1985.

Eisner, Elliot W., and National Society for the Study of Education. Learning and teaching the ways of knowing Eighty-fourth yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, pt. 2. Chicago, Ill.: National Society for the Study of Education : Distributed by University of Chicago Press, 1985.

Eisner, Elliot W., and Getty Center for Education in the Arts. The role of discipline-based art education in America's schools. Los Angeles, Calif.: Getty Center for Education in the Arts, 1988.

Eisner, Elliot W., and Alan Peshkin. Qualitative inquiry in education : the continuing debate. New York: Teachers College Press, 1990.

Eisner, Elliot W. The enlightened eye : qualitative inquiry and the enhancement of educational practice. New York, N.Y. ;: Toronto : Macmillan Pub. Co., 1991.

*Eisner, Elliot W. The educational imagination : on the design and evaluation of school programs. 3rd ed. New York,Toronto: Macmillan ; Maxwell Macmillan Canada ; Maxwell Macmillan International, 1994.

Eisner, Elliot W. Cognition and curriculum reconsidered. 2nd ed. New York: Teachers College Press, 1994.

Boughton, Douglas, Elliot W. Eisner, and Johan Ligtvoet. Evaluating and assessing the visual arts in education : international perspectives. New York: Teachers College Press, 1996.

Eisner, Elliot W. The enlightened eye : qualitative inquiry and the enhancement of educational practice. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Merrill, 1998.

**Eisner, Elliot W. The kind of schools we need : personal essays. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1998.

Eisner, Elliott W. Cognition and Curriculum. New York: Teachers College Press, 1994.

The Educational Imagination: On the Design and Evaluation of School Programs, revised ed. New York: MacMillan, 1994.

"What Really Counts in Schools." Educational Leadership, February 1991, 10-17.

Professor of Education and Art Stanford University

Chair, Curriculum Studies & Teacher Education E-Mail: eisner@leland.stanford.edu

Phone: 650-723-2115 "Elliot W. Eisner is professor of education and art at Stanford

University [since 1965] where he is known for his scholarship in three fields: arts education, curriculum studies, and educational evaluation.  His research interests focus on the development of aesthetic intelligence and the use of critical methods from the arts in studying and improving educational practice. Dr. Eisner has lectured throughout the world and has published more than 15 books, including The Enlightened Eye:Qualitative Inquiry and the Enhancement of Educational Practice, which explores the uses of critical methods from the arts in studying and describing schools, classrooms, and teaching processes. Dr. Eisner is the recipient of numerous awards for his work, including the Palmer O. Johnson Memorial Award form the American Educational Research Association, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship. Professor Eisner has served as president of the National Art Education Association, the International Society for Education through Art, the American Research Association, and is currently president-elect of the John Dewey Society."

(http://artsednet.getty.edu/ArtsEdNet/Browsing/97conf/Bios/eisner.html)

   

"He was trained as a painter at The Art Institute of Chicago and later studied design at Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of Design.  His work at these institutions and his doctoral study at the University of Chicago provided the major conceptual resources for his scholarship in three fields: arts education, curriculum studies, and educational evaluation. Dr. Eisner's research interests focus on the ways in which the arts expand awareness and advance human understanding. He is also interested in the general problems of school improvement, and especially how schools can become educational institutions for both children and the adults who work with them."

(http://www.artsedge.kennedy-center.org/nb/guests/Eisner1.html)    

"Professor Eisner's published work includes over 300 articles and chapters as wells as fifteen books, among them: Cognition and Curriculum Reconsidered (1994), The Educational Imagination: On the Design and Evaluation of School Programs (1994, 3rd ed.), and The Enlightened Eye:  Qualitative Inquiry and the Enhancement of Educational Practice (1990), The Art of Educational Evaluation: A Personal View (1985), and Educating Artistic Vision (1972)." (Ibid.)

"Dr. Eisner has received numerous awards for his work, including the Palmer O. Johnson Memorial Award from the American Educational Research Association. In September of 1998, Dr. Eisner was the recipient of the NAEA's Harold McGraw, Jr. Prize in Education. He received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as a Fulbright Fellowship, and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He is a member of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters and the Royal Society of Art in the United Kingdom. In addition to the Ph.D. in Education he earned from the University of Chicago (1962), he is also the recipient of numerous honorary doctorates from institutions of higher learning across the United States and Europe. Professor Eisner has served as President of the National Art Education Association, the International Society for Education Through Art, the American Educational Research Association, and the John Dewey Society. In April of 1999, Dr. Eisner joins four

other distinguished keynote speakers in the 1999 Charles Fowler Colloquium on Innovation in Arts Education." (Ibid.)

Education:  

AB, Roosevelt University, Chicago; MS, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago; MA, University of Chicago; Ph.D. in Education, University of Chicago (1962).

   

   

Professional Experience:  

Instructor in Art Education, Ohio State University (1960-1961); Instructor in Education, University of Chicago (1961-1962); Assistant Professor of Education, University of Chicago (1962-1965); Stanford University (1965 +).

   

   

II.   7 Modes of Thinking Elliot Eisner identifies Seven Modes of Thinking: 1) Aesthetic 2) Scientific 3) Interpersonal 4) Intuitive 5) Narrative and Paradigmatic 7) Formal 8) Spiritual

  III.   Bibliography of His Writings: Publications Fifteen books and 300+ articles. Eisner, Elliot W. The Enlightened Eye: Qualitative Inquiry and the

Enhancement of Educational Practice. 2d ed. New York: Merrill Publishing Company, 1997.

Eisner, Elliot W., and Alan Peshkin, ed. Qualitative Inquiry in Education: The Continuing Debate. New York: Teachers College Press, 1990.

Eisner, Elliot W. The Role of Discipline-Based Art Education in America's Schools. Los Angeles: Getty Center for Education in the Arts, 1988.

Eisner, Elliot W. The Art of Educational Evaluation: A Personal View.   London / Philadelphia: Falmer Press, 1985.

Eisner, Elliot W. The Educational Imagination : On the Design and Evaluation of School Programs. 3d edition. New York: Macmillan, 1994.

Eisner, Elliot W. Educating Artistic Vision. New York:  Macmillan, 1972. Eisner, Elliot W., and David W. Ecker. Readings in Art Education.  

Waltham, Mass.: Blaisdell Publication Company., 1966. Eisner, Elliot W. Evaluating and Assessing the Visual Arts in Education:

International Perspectives. Ed. Doublas Boughton, Elliot W. Eisner, and Johan Ligtvoet.  New York: Teachers College Press, 1996.

Eisner, Elliot W. Cognition and Curriculum Reconsidered. 2nd ed. New York: Teachers College Press, 1994.    

9 - Educational Objectives—Help or Hindrance?  

ELLIOT W.EISNER 

No. of pages: 355 Published in: Curriculum Studies Reader E2, Volume 1, Part 3 August 2004 , pages 85 - 92

26 - What Does It Mean to Say a School is Doing Well? 

ELLIOT W.EISNER 

No. of pages: 355 Published in: Curriculum Studies Reader E2, Volume 1, Part 5 August 2004 , pages 297 - 306

From:

Eisner, E. W. (1985) The Educational Imagination: On the Design and Evaluation of SchoolPrograms (New York: Macmillan).

From Journal of Curriculum Studies. J. CURRICULUM STUDIES, 2006, VOL. 38, NO. 4, 483–498Journal of Curriculum Studies ISSN 0022–0272 print/ISSN 1366–5839 online © 2006 Taylor & Francishttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journalsDOI: 10.1080/00220270500363620

typical lesson-planning template. It is also worth noting that these admonitions are part of a broaderemphasis on Outcomes-based Education (OBE),1 and this nexus is part of a thread of ideas stretching back over a century or more. The terminology may change, but the essences remain the same, hence the National Curriculum framework with its programmes of study, its standards, targets, and levels of attainment. Embedded within the TTA and DfES requirements are a series of injunctions that insist that learning outcomes should be the same for all students—operationally defined as exit behaviours and measured against a system of national bench-marking (Elliot 2001).

Many of the processes recommended by various authors, agencies, and policymakers are mostly derived from information-processing models of learning. As a result, the social processes that influence planning abilities in practical teaching contexts have not gained prominence. Wertsch (1991), for instance, focuses attention on the univocality found in the pervasive conduit metaphor for communication and planning; this, he claims, underpins the transmission model for learning, where the receiver is seen as passive. The model of planning and teaching represented in this minimalist conception develops as follows: aim > input > task > feedback > evaluation. It reflects an approach to teaching and learning wherein reflection and exploration are at worst luxuries, not to be afforded, and at best minor spin-offs, to be accommodated.The emphasis in the system is always on the functions: explaining, questioning, guidance, practice, task-completion, reinforcement, and evaluation. All bypass what Eisner (1985) calls the ‘educational imagination’.

Rather than guiding, it might now become a creative tool helping novices clarify and structure their thinking as they engage in the process of preparation. The core of the model should then take on greater significance as the novice begins to ask more complex questions: What do I want the children to learn?What teaching and learning styles might best bring this about? What knowledge and skills are worthwhile and how might they be best learned? How might curricular objectives and learning outcomes best inform my planning? What resources and tools might help me to engage my pupils so that learning might take place? And what are the classroom management implications of my chosen strategy? Such questions require planning and teaching to be more provisional, and open to a debate in which issues of value and belief come to the fore. It is during this extended phase that the dialogical model can help student teachers develop what Elliott (1998: 51) has called ‘that courteous translation of knowledge’, by encouraging them to shuttle freely back and forth between the components, examining each according to their emergent professional knowledge, values, and expertise.

Reimagining Schools: The Selected Works of Elliot W. Eisner (Routledge), Hardcover (2005)by Elliot W Eisner

Hardcover, Routledge 2005 English 220 pages

ISBN: 0415366445ISBN-13: 9780415366441

Professor Elliot Eisner has spent the last forty years researching, thinking and writing about some of the key enduring issues in arts education, curriculum studies and qualitative research. He has compiled a career-long collection of his finest work including extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings and major theoretical contributions, and brought them together in a single volume. Starting with a specially written introduction, which gives an overview of Professor Eisner's career and contextualizes his selection, the chapters cover a wide range of issues including: children and art; the use of educational connoisseurship; aesthetic modes of knowing; absolutism and relativism in curriculum theory; education reform and the ecology of schooling; and the future of education research.hart the contributions made by Professor Eisner over his forty year career towards the development of Arts Education, Curriculum Studies and Qualitative Research. This book is a true gem for anyone wishing to know more about these exciting fields.

Yale University Press, 2004

The Arts and the Creation of Mind

by Elliot W Eisner

Although the arts are often thought to be closer to the rim of education than to its core, they are, surprisingly, critically important means for developing complex and subtle aspects of the mind, argues Elliot Eisner in this discussion. In it he describes how various forms of thinking are evoked, developed, and refined through the arts. These forms of thinking, Eisner argues, are more helpful in dealing with the ambiguities and uncertainties of daily life than are the formally structured curricula that are employed today in schools. Offering an array of examples, Eisner describes different approaches to the teaching of the arts and the virtues each possesses when well taught. He discusses especially nettlesome issues pertaining to the evaluation of performance in the arts. Perhaps most importantly, Eisner seeks to provide a fresh and admittedly iconoclastic perspective on what the arts can contribute to education, namely a new vision of both its aims and its means. This new perspective, Eisner argues, is especially important today, a time at which mechanistic forms of technical rationality often dominate our thinking about the conduct and assessment of education.

THIS IS THE BOOK I HAVE!!! SHOULD BE NOTES/QUOTES/REFERENCE IN

MY SAVED DOCUMENTS/ FINAL PAPERS

The Educational Imagination: On the Design and Evaluation of School Programs

by Elliot W Eisner

Prentice Hall 2001 English 3rd ed. 389 pages

ISBN: 0130942871ISBN-13: 9780130942876

MacMillan Publishing Company, 1985

This highly regarded curriculum development text by one of the most prominent figures in the field is designed to help readers understand the major approaches to curriculum planning and the formation of educational goals. In this edition, Eisner provides a conceptual framework that shows students the different ways in which the aims of education can be regarded...and, describes their implications for curriculum planning and teaching practices. Coverage is grounded in the belief that the appropriateness of any given educational practice is dependent upon the characteristics and context of the school program, and the values of the community that program serves.

Learning and Teaching the Ways of Knowing

by Elliot W Eisner (Editor)

The Eighty-Fourth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, Part II

Qualitative Inquiry in Education: The Continuing Debate

by Elliot W Eisner

Hardcover, Toronto, 1991

PAPER BACK: Prentice Hall, 1997

The Enlightened Eye: Qualitative Inquiry and the Enhancement of Educational Practice

by Elliot W Eisner

seminal work in qualitative research methods is the definitive statement on qualitative research from the perspective of connoiseurship and criticism. This benchmark work gives students a solid understanding of qualitative research and evaluation, and its great promise for evaluating and guiding educational practice. It demonstrates how methods used by critics in the arts and humanities-such as observing performance qualities, setting, and interaction patterns-also apply to the study of classroom practice. Excellent examples are provided to show students what this type of research looks like, and how it can be applied to the evaluation of teaching, learning, and the overall school environment.

QUOTES FROM EISNER’S WORKS:

The analysis of the complexity of postmodern theories requires multiple voices, contextual reflection, and expanded illustrations in order to move toward new modes of research beyond the traditionalist, progressive, or reconstructionist philosophies. Many scholars conclude that a paradigm shift in curriculum research is underway guided by a new cosmology (Doll, 1993). Postmodern curriculum research must be evaluated in this context; a new set of questions must emerge. A reevaluation of the assumptions about the nature of curriculum research is underway. The well attended AERA sessions with Maxine Greene, Eliot Eisner, and Howard Gardner addressing the nature of arts-based research testifies to the lively interest in exploring these assumptions.

Elliot Eisner (1997) presents the "promise and perils" of alternative forms of research representation, particularly arts-based experiences such as fiction, art installations, dance, and readers theater:

One of the basic questions scholars are now raising is how we perform the magical feat of transforming the contents of our consciousness into a public form that others can understand. The assumption that the language of the social sciences -propositional language and number-are the exclusive agents of meaning is becoming increasingly problematic, and as a result, we are exploring the potential of other forms of representation for illuminating the educational worlds we wish to understand.... The concept of alternative forms of data representation presents an image that acknowledges the variety of ways through which our experience is coded.

Eisner, E.W. (1996). Yes, but is it research? The conversation continues: Should a novel count as a dissertation in education. Chicago: AERA Session 5.25.

THIS IS A “SUMMARY” OF A CONCEPT FROM:Eisner, E. W. (1985) The Educational Imagination: On the Design and Evaluation of School Programs (New York: Macmillan).

attention on the univocality found in the pervasive conduit metaphor for communication and planning; this, he claims, underpins the transmission model for learning, where the receiver is seen as passive. The model of planning and teaching represented in this minimalist conception develops as follows: aim > input > task > feedback > evaluation. It reflects an approach to teaching and learning wherein reflection and exploration are at worst luxuries, not to be afforded, and at best minor spin-offs, to be accommodated.The emphasis in the system is always on the functions: explaining, questioning, guidance, practice, task-completion, reinforcement, and evaluation. All bypass what Eisner (1985) calls the ‘educational imagination’.

From: Michigan Art Education Association

http://www.miarted.org/index.asp

The arts teach children to exercise that most exquisite of capacities, the ability to make judgments in the absence of rules. The rules that the arts obey are located in our children s emotional interior; children come to feel a rightness of fit among the qualities with which they work. . . .they must exercise judgments by looking inside them selves.-Elliot W. Eisner, Stanford University, L.A. Times. ARTS: 4

The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution. This, too, is at odds with the use in our schools of multiple choice tests in which there are no multiple correct answers. The tacit lesson is that there is almost always, a single correct answer. It s seldom that wan in life.-Elliot W. Eisner, Stanford University, Essay from The Los Angeles Times. ARTS: 5

A third lesson is that aims can be held flexibly; in the arts the goal one starts with can be changed midway in the process as unexpected opportunities arrive. Flexibility yields opportunities for surprise. . . Creative thinking abhors routine.-Elliot W. Eisner, Stanford University, Essay from The Los Angeles Times. ARTS: 6

The arts also teach that neither words nor numbers define the limits of our cognition; we know more than we can tell. There are many experiences and a multitude of occasions in which we need art forms to say what we cannot say. . . . Reflect on 9-11. . . The arts can provide forms of communication that convey to others what is ineffable.-Elliot W. Eisner, Stanford University, Essay from The Los Angeles Times. ARTS: 7

Finally, the arts are about joy. They are about the experience of being moved, of having one's life enriched, of discovering our capacity to feel. It that was all they did, they would arrant a generous place at our table.-Elliot W. Eisner, Stanford University, Essay from The Los Angeles Times. ARTS: 8

NOT SURE WHERE THESE QUOTES CAME FROM; WILL HAVE TO RESEARCH THE REFERENCE …. COULD “WING IT?”

http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/18830.Elliot_W_Eisner

"Minds, unlike brains, are not entirely given at birth. Minds are also forms of cultural achievement."— Elliot W. Eisner

"The limits of our cognition are not defined by the limits of our language." — Elliot W. Eisner

THESE BOOKS ARE LISTED ON THIS SITE AS “FAVORITE” BOOKS by Elliot W. Eisner

The Arts and the Creation of Mind

September 10th 2004 by Yale University Press Paperback, 280 pages Isbn 0300105118    (isbn13: 9780300105117)

Learning in and through the arts can develop complex and subtle aspects of the mind, argues Elliot Eisner in this engrossing book. Offering a rich array of examples, he describes different approaches to the teaching of the arts and shows how these refine forms of thinking that are valuable in dealing with our daily life“Not since John Dewey has an American author written about art, education, and the creation of mind with such power and sensitivity.”—Michael Day, International Journal of Arts Education“A primer for the future. . . . This book will serve as an inspiration for those needing the language to convince policy makers and curriculum developers of the value of the arts in education, while also serving as a vehicle for illustrating the educational aspirations the very best education can offer.”—Rita L. Irwin, Journal of Critical Inquiry Into Curriculum and Instruction“[Eisner] has composed a text that is as insightful and inspirational as the educational research he envisions.”—James G. Henderson, International Journal of Education & the Arts

Enlightened Eye, The: Qualitative Inquiry and the Enhancement of Educational Practice

July 24th 1997 by Prentice Hall Paperback, 264 pages Isbn 0135314194    (isbn13: 9780135314197) This is an important new resource in qualitative research methods and educational research. This benchmark work gives readers a solid understanding of qualitative research and evaluation, and its great promise for evaluating and guiding educational practice. It demonstrates how the same methods used by critics in the arts and humanities, such as observing performance qualities, setting, and interaction patterns, also applies to the classroom practice. Excellent examples are

provided to show what this type of research looks like, and how it can be applied to the evaluation of teaching, learning, and the overall school environment

The Educational Imagination: On the Design and Evaluation of School Programs (3rd Edition)

August 5th 2001 by Prentice Hall (first published 1994) Paperback, 389 pages Isbn 0130942871    (isbn13: 9780130942876)

The Educational Imagination explores the current state of American education and provides a historical view of earlier efforts to reform our schools. It describes the ideological positions of those who wish to shape the aims and content of school programs in ways that reflect their values.

The Kind of Schools We Need: Personal Essays

"Education without the arts would be an impoverished enterprise." So says award-winning author Elliot Eisner, an internationally renowned authority on how the arts can be used to improve education. In a long and distinguished career, Eisner has given eloquent voice to the concerns of those who decry the marginalization of the arts in school curriculums. Now, for the first time ever, readers will have access to his best essays in one concise volume.

The Kind of Schools We Need reviews Eisner's ground-breaking theories on aesthetic intelligencetheories that have helped us rethink the connections among art, literacy, research, and evaluation. A full section devoted to cognition and representation explains how the process of education expands and deepens the kinds of meaning people have in their lives. Schools must therefore help children learn to encode and decode the many forms of meaning they encounter, be they visual, auditory, linguistic, kinesthetic, or mathematical. It is precisely because those meanings are often expressed through the arts, that Eisner believes the critical methods employed in the arts have broader educational relevance. That relevance is explored in a section entitled "Rethinking Educational Research," which examines how the arts can be used to study, understand, and improve educational practice.

In an era when school reform movements are sweeping the nation, Eisner's organic or "ecological" approach is more cogent than ever. He discusses this approach in detail in the final section of the book, "The Practice and Reform of Schools," making problematic beliefs about the utility of fixed and uniform standards in a nation whose schools serve fifty million students. It is fitting, then, that with The Kind of Schools We Need, teachers, school administrators, and scholars will find a connection to one of the most influential thinkers in education today.

Creating and Beyond: Art Education for a Changing World

September 15th 1996 by Oxford University Press, USA Paperback, 90 pages

Isbn 089236419X    (isbn13: 9780892364190)

Through the arts children learn invaluable skills that are provided by no other subject taught in today's schools. This book explains why it is imperative that the arts be included in the curriculum if America's students are to succeed in a competitive and constantly changing globalenvironment. The book also demonstrates the accomplishments of the past ten years in the Center for Education regional institute program as well as in other schools across the country. Including an argument for the importance of arts education in a changing world, perspective pieces by business,creative, social, and cultural leaders, and snapshots and portraits of successful arts education programs nationwide, the book will be an invaluable resource for parents, educators, and policy makers.

Cognition and Curriculum Reconsidered

March 1994 by Teachers College Press Paperback, 118 pages Isbn 0807733105    (isbn13: 9780807733103) 'Can give you some idea of the vision you are trying to transmit amidst all those examination results' - Management in Education

'The powerful ideas ... in the First Edition have gained ... urgency from the realities of the political policies for education which the intervening years have witnessed in both the USA and the UK. ..... the book’s main theme - the narrowness of the concept of education encapsulated in those policies - gains added force from the growing predominance of technicist approaches to curriculum planning' - Professor A V Kelly, Goldsmiths’ College, University of London

Cognition and Curriculum became a seminal book which was essential reading for students of education over the last decade. Now, as the back-to-basics curriculum and standardized modes of evaluation - whose very foundations Elliot W Eisner was questioning a decade ago - are again finding favour with politicians, Eisner has revised his classic work. The result is Cognition and Curriculum Reconsidered, a substantially revised edition that adds two new chapters, including a critique of the reform efforts of the intervening years.

Educating Artistic Vision

June 1st 1997 by National Art Education Association

Paperback Isbn 0614309034    (isbn13: 9780614309034) June 1st 1997 by National Art Education Association

More EISNER QUOTES … AGAIN NOT SURE OF THE DIRECT SOURCE REFERENCE…COULD “PARAPHRASE” TO USE THE CONCEPT IN YOUR PAPER….

ABOUT ART FROM http://www.princetonol.com/groups/iad/lessons/middle/quotes.htm

"Art is literacy of the heart" Elliot Eisner "If apple is the language of the future, then art must be the core." Elliot Eisner

 Elliot Eisner quote FROM http://thinkexist.com/quotes/elliot_eisner

“We have inadvertently designed a system in which being good at what you do as a teacher is not formally rewarded, while being poor at what you do is seldom corrected nor penalized.”

FROM: http://www.successlineinc.com/quotes.html

What's not worth teaching is not worth teaching well. Elliot Eisner