Abstract
Elliot W. Eisner passed away at his home in Stanford, California, on January 10, 2014. Eisner was the Lee Jacks Emeritus Professor of Education and Art at Stanford University, where he had taught for 42 years. Eisner graduated from Chicago’s John Marshall High School and then from Roosevelt University with a BA in art and education. He received his MS in art from the Illinois Institute of Technology and taught high school art for 2 years. He later earned his master’s and PhD in Education from the University of Chicago. Over the course of his academic career, Eisner championed ways that the arts could benefit student learning as well as educational practice. His many published books include The Enlightened Eye (1991) and The Educational Imagination (1979).
With Elliot Eisner’s recent passing, we are reminded that he actually began his signature work on arts-based research by writing about program evaluation. His 1975 occasional paper “The Perceptive Eye: Toward the Reformation of Educational Evaluation” argued that evaluation can productively proceed from an artistic model as well as a scientific one. In 1976, he published “Educational Connoisseurship and Criticism: Their Form and Functions in Educational Evaluation” in the Journal of Aesthetic Criticism in which he discussed the limitations of conventional forms of educational evaluation. A year later, “On the Uses of Educational Connoisseurship and Criticism for Evaluating Classroom Life” appeared in Teachers College Press, where he argued that two concepts—connoisseurship and criticism—yielded procedures that could complement scientific approaches. Many of us acknowledge the influence of his depiction of the evaluator as connoisseur as well as his explication of quality and its representation on our thinking about and our practice of evaluation. I, for one, realize that, while I am seldom an expert in what I evaluate, I can appreciate the quality and qualities of the program. I know how to recognize evidence that reveals goodness and I can represent that goodness. These sensitivities and skills are what Eisner spoke and wrote of.
Two evaluators who knew him well offer the following tributes. Robert Donmoyer revisits Eisner’s evaluation ideas and briefly considers why Eisner’s thinking about evaluation has had a relatively obscure impact on the evaluation field. The article also demonstrates that some of Eisner’s thinking and arts-based strategies can effectively inform evaluators and evaluation. In the next memoir, Robert Stake, recalling a course he cotaught with Eisner, captures his friend and colleague’s thinking on quality and connoisseurship-and its value to evaluation practice.