Cognitive Pluralism

• In Event: 61.067 - Taking Elliot Eisner's Scholarship Forward

Abstract

As a former artist, Elliot Eisner persistently challenged the common stereotype that art was a product of the hands and heart, but not a product of the head. He often extrapolated this argument to wider forms of achievement in both education and research. For Eisner, art (and any endeavors that seeks to illuminate perception) depends on ways of knowing as well as ways of doing. He defined cognition as “. . .a matter of becoming conscious, of noticing, of recognizing, of perceiving. It is a matter of distinguishing one thing from another: a figure from its ground, the various subtleties and nuances that , when perceived, become a part of one’s consciousness” (1985, p. 203).
The objective of this paper is to draw on Eisner’s work to develop two related arguments. The first argument is that humans not only possess multiple ways of knowing, but that these ways of knowing are non-redundant. The modalities in which cognition operates are specialized to take the impress of some experiences but not others. It would be difficult, for example, to describe the visual effects of fog on the rolling fields of a Midwestern farm using mathematics alone; and equally difficult to determine the physical strength of a brass alloy using poetry. In making this point, Eisner often drew on John Dewey’s 1934 book, Art as Experience. In this volume, Dewey writes that for art and art criticism to serve the purposes of allowing us to reconstruct experience, that experience “. . .must been seen in the perspective of a world so multiform and so full that it contains an infinite variety of qualities. . .and other ways of response” (p. 337).
The second argument is a consequence of the first. Schools, teachers, and curricula that fail to recognize such a “multiform world” do youth a grave disservice. For example, schools often follow Bloom’s Taxonomy by separating cognition from affect and psychomotor skills, and then placing the former at the pinnacle of human attainment. Where in school curricula do we find non-propositional, metaphoric, or visual forms of knowing? Where do non-academic students find a place to shine? Non-academic students are labeled “at risk” or “low achieving.” Some recognize the irony of this bias by pointing out that cognitive pluralism is widely valued outside of school in such settings as work (Rose, 2004) and family life (Noddings, 2006).
The significance of these twin arguments rests on the question of how we implicitly mark out the successful from the non-successful; the educated from the merely trained.
References
Dewey, J. 1934. Art as Experience. New York, NY: Penguin Group.
Eisner, E. W. 1985. The art of educational evaluation. Philadelphia, PA Falmer Press.
Noddings, N. 2006. Critical lessons. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Rose, M. 2004. The mind at work: Valuing the intelligence of the American worker. New York, NY: Viking.

Author

• David J. Flinders, Indiana University