Eisner's Legacy...and the Need to Update It

• In Event: Updating Eisner: Incorporating Indigenous and Digital Inquiry Into Arts-Based Educational Research

Abstract

Eisner’s Legacy
The initial presentation sets the stage for the two presentations that follow by briefly examining Eisner’s legacy. This presenter will begin by noting that Eisner began his professional career as a painter and art teacher, and that, once he entered academia, the arts influenced his thinking and writing. Among other things, the presenter will cite Eisner’s (1969, 1979) argument that what he initially called expressive objectives and later renamed expressive activities could be viable alternatives to behavioral objectives in constructing curricula.

The presenter will go on to note that the influence of the arts and humanities became much more obvious once Eisner touted art criticism as a model for doing program evaluation. Eisner’s efforts to envision program evaluation as a process akin to art criticism occurred during a period when the emerging evaluation field was exploring a range of so-called evaluation “models.” Eisner’s model, which he labeled educational connoisseurship and criticism, envisioned evaluators doing what art connoisseurs do when they play the art critic role: describing what was being critiqued with evocative language that, to the extent possible, captures the “feeling” of what was being described; interpreting the work being critiqued; and passing judgement on the quality the work. (Later, Eisner added the category of thematics, i.e., a statement about the overarching essence of what was being critiqued, to his list of things that critics, whether in the arts or the education fields, should provide readers.)

As interest in distinctive evaluation models waned, Eisner began writing about arts based educational research more generally. This shift had the advantage of muting, at least somewhat, criticism of Eisner’s arts-based approach for being overly subjective, i.e., an approach in which the judgement of a single supposed connoisseur could conceivably determine the fate of a program being evaluated. The products of arts-based educational research were not necessarily less subjective, of course, but the real-world consequences were less troublesome when the focus was on expanding the way a general audience perceived and thought about educational phenomena and issues.

The Need to Update Eisner’s Legacy
Examples of arts-based research have never been easy to find on the pages of the educational research field’s most selective journals. For the most part, those who do this sort of work have had to rely on books to publish arts-based work. It is unlikely that things will improve much in the future. Indeed, should academic journals go the way of other print periodicals in this digital age, the popularity of journal articles in general may wane.

In addition, at a time when the focus increasingly is on BIPOC issues and BIPOC-related research both in and out of academia, it is unlikely that traditional versions of arts-based inquiry will increase in popularity. This session features two ways to respond to changing times and, consequently, two ways to possibly increase the presence of arts-based inquiry which has never had much of a presence in the field’s selective academic journals.

Author

• Robert B. Donmoyer, University of San Diego