Elliot W. Eisner – författare

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 engrossing book. 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 a rich 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 important, Eisner provides 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.

Elliot Eisner has spent the last forty years researching, thinking and writing about some of the 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 Eisner’s career and contextualises 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* the future of education research.

Elliot Eisner has spent the last forty years researching, thinking and writing about some of the 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 Eisner’s career and contextualises 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* the future of education research.

The Handbook of Research and Policy in Art Education marks a milestone in the field of art education. Sponsored by the National Art Education Association and assembled by an internationally known group of art educators, this 36-chapter handbook provides an overview of the remarkable progress that has characterized this field in recent decades. Organized into six sections, it profiles and integrates the following elements of this rapidly emerging field: history, policy, learning, curriculum and instruction, assessment, and competing perspectives. Because the scholarly foundations of art education are relatively new and loosely coupled, this handbook provides researchers, students, and policymakers (both inside and outside the field) an invaluable snapshot of its current boundaries and rapidly growing content. In a nutshell, it provides much needed definition and intellectual respectability to a field that as recently as 1960 was more firmly rooted in the world of arts and crafts than in scholarly research.

The Handbook of Research and Policy in Art Education marks a milestone in the field of art education. Sponsored by the National Art Education Association and assembled by an internationally known group of art educators, this 36-chapter handbook provides an overview of the remarkable progress that has characterized this field in recent decades. Organized into six sections, it profiles and integrates the following elements of this rapidly emerging field: history, policy, learning, curriculum and instruction, assessment, and competing perspectives. Because the scholarly foundations of art education are relatively new and loosely coupled, this handbook provides researchers, students, and policymakers (both inside and outside the field) an invaluable snapshot of its current boundaries and rapidly growing content. In a nutshell, it provides much needed definition and intellectual respectability to a field that as recently as 1960 was more firmly rooted in the world of arts and crafts than in scholarly research.

Now available from TC Press with a new foreword by Nel Noddings and a new prologue by P. Bruce Uhrmacher and Christy McConnell Moroye, this classic text on qualitative research is ideal for both novice and established researchers. Eisner’s seminal work on mind, education, and research explores the ways in which the methods, content, and assumptions in the arts, humanities, and social sciences can help us better understand our schools and classrooms. The Enlightened Eye expands how we think about inquiry in education and broadens our views about what it means to “know” with the goal of positively influencing the educational experience of those who live and work in our schools. The text includes examples depicting this type of research and how it can be used to evaluate teaching, learning, and the school environment. Book Features: provides researchers with ethical frameworks promoting diversity and inclusivity; establishes connections between qualitative inquiry in our daily lives and its functions in the practice and study of education; and broadens understanding of how we come to know the world.

First published in 1985, The Art of Educational Evaluation traces the evolution of the author’s thinking about both educational evaluation and curriculum from the mid-1960s through the early period of the 1980s. Eisner questions some of the more hallowed assumptions about educational planning and educational evaluation and provides a perspective on both curriculum and evaluation that has been influenced by his work in the fine arts. The book provides a fresh perspective with which to view the nature of evaluation and curriculum planning.