Eisner's Forms of Representation and the Democracy of Education

• In Event: Roundtable Session 23
  In Roundtable Session: Eisner in Perspective: An Eclectic Imagination for Contemporary Education

Abstract

This paper seeks to carry forward some heretofore overlooked aspects of Eisner’s intervention in research and evaluation methodologies, particularly with respect to his canonical development of the role of “forms of representation” in knowledge claims. While a multiplicity of forms of representation successfully resists the tyranny of “propositional language and number” (Eisner, 1997, p. 4) in communicating knowledge, it nevertheless leaves a good amount of labor undone, something akin to what Stanley Cavell has called “tak[ing] up the slack between the uncertainty of judgment and the finality of decision” (Cavell, 1979, p. 31). I wish to invoke Cavell’s “conversation” and Schwab’s “commonplaces” as examples of democratic practices that ameliorate both the false certainty of positivism and the indefeasible uncertainty of relativism.

Author

• Derek Gottlieb, University of Basel