What the Arts Taught Me about Education

Elliot W. Eisner

59 citations0/0 files stored

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Art Education and Development Evaluation of Teaching Practices Education, Philosophy, and Society

Abstract

ions referring to absent populations, no teacher can rely upon them exclusively for dealing with particular students in particular classrooms in particular schools. Like all artistic activities, the features of the specific material or situation must be addressed without relying upon algorithms for decision-making. These features of teaching seem perfectly plain to me. They are less clear to many others, although as I have indicated, the field of education is moving toward a more artistically conscious view of the nature of teaching than it has in the past (Kagan, 1989). When there is a willingness to recognize the artistic nature of excellent teaching and to acknowledge the inherent limitations of the social sciences in guiding teachers, possibilities emerge for treating the improvement of teaching in ways that are not unlike those used to improve individual performance in any art (Atkin, 1989). When such ways are examined, attention to nuance in performance becomes crucial and the use of a language through which it can be revealed, essential. These processes are examples of connoisseurship and criticism (Eisner, 1985). What the arts have taught me is that nuance counts, in teaching no less than in painting. It has taught me that not everything can be reduced to quantity and that the attempt to do so creates a destructive form of reductionism and a misleading sense of precision. I have learned from the arts that poetic language is often needed to render a performance vivid, and that suggestion and innuendo are often more telling than stark statement of fact. The logical categories and operational definifions that appear so attractive in the social sciences are, in my view, often misplaced in so fragile and delicate an enterprise as teaching. Although the traditional ambition of nailing down the facts and measuring the outcomes have long been sources of cognitive security for some, they are beginning to give way to a more elastic but relevant form of disclosure. That is one of the reasons why ethnography is now seen as a useful way to understand classrooms and schools. When Clifford Geertz (1988) says that anthropological authority often emanates from the ways in which some anthropologists write, he recognizes the artistic contributions to anthropological scholarship. Geertz is by no means alone. The previously sacrosanct methods and criteria for social science inquiry, methods that once aspired to those of physics, are being reconceptualized and widened in the process. The direction is toward the arts. The conceptualization of teaching as an artistic activity and the acceptance of epistemological pluralism have opened the Art Education/September 1991 17 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.76 on Wed, 24 Aug 2016 04:46:12 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Wx l;:::::?-~':::E3''~i :?:r: .-ii: :::~l:i zi''iJiiS:,::::: :.. , : : ':~:;l':-i'ij~!~: iim.B::-:~ I;.:Bi.-i,~:~:=: ::si:: i:: I:: .-.. ;got 'e,-i~~'~ j~.iiii-i i-iiil :::` lot:::::::.': ::':::: :::: -::0 WI --::~::':iaei~:-_---j~j-:::::s~i:li::;:Al,: ::::: ?:::: ::(::::~::-:?:::ini':: ?:::as:iii 0 Vivienne della Grotta 1987' door to a form of evaluation that is rooted in the arts and humanities. Educational connoisseurship and educational criticism (Eisner, 1985) are efforts to use and extend aims and methods employed to heighten awareness of works of art to educational practice. Connoisseurship is the art of appreciation; criticism the art of disclosure. They are means with which to see and to articulate the qualities and values of particular works of art by using a language that helps others see those works more completely. The genre of educational criticism is literary. While an educational critic might use some of the techniques of the cultural anthropologist, interviewing students, for example, the aims of the critic's work is not anthropological, it is educational. It is intended to heighten awareness of the classroom or of teaching, or of the materials students and teachers use. It is critical, interpretive, and often poetic in flavor. From the arts I have learned that such efforts can amplify perception and expand consciousness of what otherwise might go unseen. Much of my own work over the last two decades has been aimed at elucidating that model and fostering its legitimation in the field of education. I believe much progress has been made. Another lesson I learned from the arts deals with how we think about the outcomes of educational practice. In the standard model of rational educational planning, the task confronting the planner is, first, to be clear about his or her objectives, to specify them in detail and, if possible, to define them in measurable terms.4 By using this model, curriculum development is believed to be made easier because clarity of aims is thought to facilitate the invention of means for their achievement. In addition, aims, by and large, are to be common among students of the same age levels, as are the tests they are to take to demonstrate competency. The education summit talk of September, 1989 about national goals for America's schools, defined in measureable terms, is nothing less than the rationale I have described directing educational policy at the highest levels of our government. Clarity of expectation subjected to a common form of examination using standardized criteria meets the accepted canons of rationality and objectivity. My experience in the arts has taught me a different lesso . From the arts I have learned that not only cannot all outcomes be measured, they frequently cannot be predicted. When humans work on tasks, they almost always learn more and less than what was intended. Furthermore, teaching that is not hog-tied to rigid specifications often moves in directions and explores ideas that neither the students nor the teacher could envision at the outset. In addition, virtue in education is much more than achieving uniformity in outcomes among students. Such an aim might be defensible in a training program, but when one values individual vision and personal creativity, the specter of all fourth graders marchi g at the same pace to the same drummer toward the same destination is a 4The salience of hyper-rationalized views of educational p anning as represented in the work of Robert Mager and James Popham has diminished in recent years. However, it is well to recall how oversimplified conceptions of intelligenr professional planning undermined genuine professionalism among teachers by its failure to appreciate the need for what Dewey referred to as flexible purposing. As teachers have a larger say in schools, the acknowledgem nt of artistry and the need for flexibility is likely to increase. 18 Art Education/September 1991 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.76 on Wed, 24 Aug 2016 04:46:12 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms vision that better fits the current People's Republic of China than a nation aspiring to become a genuine democracy. In short, educational practice does not display its highest virtues in uniformity, but in nurturing productive diversity. The evocation of such diversity is what all genuine art activities have in common. Even art forms as apparently restrictive as the music of the baroque or the brush painting of the Meiji Period in Japan made it possible for artists to improvise in order to reveal their own personalities in their work. Educational programs, I learned from the arts, should not be modeled after the standardized procedures of the factory; the studio is a better image. When one seeks not uniformity of outcome, but productive diversity, the need to create forms of evaluation that can handle uniqueness of outcome becomes increasingly apparent: The multiple-choice test will no longer do. Any approach that prizes such outcomes forgoes commensurability, a source of deep security for many. When we cease putting all children on the same statistically derived distribution, we have to think and judge, we have to interpret what it is that they have done. We move more and more towards connoisseurship. And when we talk to others about what we have learned, we move more and more towards criticism, that age-old process of interpretation and appraisal. An artistic perspective, once taken, colors the way we see all facets of the educational enterprise; it is not restricted to a bit here and a piece there. What then have I learned from the arts that has influenced the way I think about education? I have learned that knowledge cannot be reduced to what can be said. I have learned that the process of working on a problem yields its own intrinsically valuable rewards and that these rewards are as important as the outcomes. I have leamed that goals are not stable targets at which you aim, but directions towards which you travel. I have leamed that no part of a composition, whether in a painting or in a school, is independent of the whole in which it participates. I have learned that scientific modes of knowledge are not the only ones that inform and develop human cognition. I have learned that as a constructive activity science as well as the fine arts are artistically created structures. I have leamed these lessons and more. Not a bad intellectual legacy, I think. And not a bad foundation on which to build better schools for both children and teachers. Elliot W. Eisner is Professor of Education and Art at Stanford University, Stanford, California, and President-Elect of the American Educational Research Association.