ESS4104: Curriculum Evaluation

Qualitative evaluation: Eisner’s Conception of Connoisseurship and Criticism

Four senses in which teaching may be considered an art:

1 The teacher is accomplished in his or her craft; for the student as well as the teacher
the classroom is an aesthetic experience.

2 Teachers (painters, dancers) make on-the-spot judgments during the teaching process
based on qualities discerned during the course of the process. Pace, tone and tempo
are among the qualitative features of teaching that are selected and reselected by the
teacher as he/she “reads” or decodes students’ responses.

3 Artistry in teaching requires routines or repertoires upon which the individual teacher
calls. There is a tension and a balance between automaticity (automatic thinking) and
inventiveness (creativity).

4 Teaching achieves ends sometimes unanticipated at the start, but which are desirable,
even welcomed. Therefore the need to be prescriptive is reduced, even abhorred.

Eisner sees teaching as art, as distinct from teaching as craft. A craft, he argues, is a process
through which skills are employed to achieve pre-determined outcomes; art is a process in
which skills are utilized to discover ends through action. The teacher, as an artist, avoids the
freezing of “pedagogical intelligence” into mechanical and routinized behaviours by allowing
for the unanticipated and creative (Eisner, 1985). The emphasis is on creativity and
discovery.

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 Educational Connoisseurship

Eisner uses the term, connoisseurship (meaning, to know). Connoisseurship requires the
capacity to see, not merely to look. He argues that to see (to perceive) operates at two
levels:

(i) Primary epistemic seeing – being aware of the particular/the specific; for example,
the activity may be students asking questions.

(ii) Secondary epistemic seeing – seeing the particular as a member of a larger set or
category. For example, students asking questions may be interpreted as students’
seeking autonomy or identity.

The connoisseur appreciates excellence, that is, he/she experiences the superb qualities that make
up the object or idea being examined (wine, art, a classroom, teaching); further he/she
understands something about the idea or object, and can make judgments about the idea or
object.

Interconnecting dimensions of schooling

The connoisseur looks for the interconnectedness of various aspects of schooling. There are
five dimensions:

(i) The intentional (the goals or aims)

(ii) The structural or organizational features of the school- hierarchical, segmented,

collaborative

(iii) The curricular dimension – design and implementation (sequential

interdependence or pooled interdependence)

(iv) The pedagogical (teaching) dimension – teacher autonomy, teacher collegiality,

teacher subject knowledge

(v) The evaluative dimension

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The educational connoisseur studies these five dimensions of schooling through the following
methods:

(a) direct observations of teachers and classroom life through interviews, as well as from
examination of instructional materials,

(b) student work,

(c) teacher-made tests,

(d) notices etc. from school administrators,

(e) homework assignments

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Educational criticism

Connoisseurship is a private act of appreciation. When the connoisseur becomes a critic, he or

she makes this private act public. This public act which illuminates, interprets, and appraises
the qualities that have been experienced is termed, CRITICISM.

Criticism is an act of reconstruction of that experience gained through connoisseurship. Eisner

suggests four (4) dimensions of criticism:

(i) Description

(ii) Interpretation

(iii) Evaluation

(iv) Thematics – thematics refers to the task of educational criticism in the identification
of a broader theme or idea in a particular situation. In other words, into what type of
category does the evaluation of a lesson, school fit.

Assessment

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Eisner, in his later work (1993) has argued that the term, evaluation is outdated, and has been
replaced by the term, assessment. He proposes eight (8) criteria for appraising authentic
assessment:

1 Tasks used to assess what students know and can do need to reflect the tasks they
will encounter in the world outside schools, not merely those limited to the schools
themselves.

2 Tasks used to assess should reveal how students go about solving a problem, not
only the solutions they formulate.

3 Assessment tasks should reflect the values of the intellectual community from
which the tasks are derived.

4 Assessment tasks need not be limited to solo/individual performance.

5 New assessment tasks should make possible more than one acceptable answer to a
question.

6 Assessment tasks should have curricular relevance, but not be limited to the
curriculum as taught.

7 Assessment tasks should require students to display sensitivity to configurations or

wholes, not simply to discrete elements.

8 Assessment tasks should permit the student to select a form of representation he

or she chooses to display what has been learnt.

References

Eisner, E. (1985). The educational imagination: On the design and evaluation of school
programs. New York: Macmillan.

Eisner, E. (1991). The enlightened eye: Qualitative inquiry and the enhancement of educational
practice. New York: Macmillan.

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Eisner, E. (1993). Reshaping assessment in education: Some criteria in search of practice.
Journal of Curriculum Studies, 25(3), 219-233.

HH, 22 January 2021