Educational Connoisseurship

Educational connoisseurship is a term used in the field of curriculum evaluation and research to denote a heightened sense of awareness of the subtleties of various educational and curricular phenomena. The term was coined by Elliot Eisner in the early 1980s. Educational connoisseurship is the first condition necessary to engage in the act of educational criticism. Educational criticism is an approach to educational evaluation in which the subtle qualities perceived are rendered in a form that is analogous to the writing of art critics.

Educational connoisseurship implies an ability to see clearly the complexities within educational or curricular commonplaces. In defining connoisseurship, in general, Eisner drew upon the work of John Dewey as he distinguished between the act of recognizing particulars as members of a category or examples of a concept, and the act of perceiving qualities within objects, settings, or events that set them apart from all others. Perceiving requires a kind of sensory exploration that goes beyond mere recognition of that which has been previously encountered. One may therefore be a connoisseur in almost any aspect of life, whether baseball, bicycles, beer, artistic sculpture, or curriculum materials. An evaluator or researcher who is an educational connoisseur observing, for example, a classroom will be able to appreciate the unique [Page 314]character of the activities in which students and teachers are engaged.

How is connoisseurship developed? It begins with a desire to experience and appreciate nuances within a set of phenomena. However, this experience must be developed over time, the result of a sustained, focused effort at perception. Moreover, connoisseurship demands a concentration that provides lasting memories of particular qualities experienced. Memory provides a crucial background against which new perceptions are placed, allowing for finer discriminations of qualities. In classroom settings, therefore, an educational connoisseur must become a student of human behavior or artifacts. This role will usually require, among other things, experience within a variety of educational settings over time that allows for ever more finely tuned comparisons and contrasts to be made.

Eisner also emphasized the importance of a classroom structure within which apprehended particulars are placed (although other theorists have not unanimously agreed with this). Eisner often employed the metaphor of a game of chess to make this point: In order to understand the meaning of the various moves therein, players and onlookers must first be aware of the structure or rules of the game in which particular strategies are played out. Likewise, for Eisner, a deep acquaintance of the educational connoisseur with various theories in the social sciences (and education in particular) is important, along with a broad understanding of educational history. Once again, this theoretical and historical knowledge should serve as a backdrop for richer descriptions of educational phenomena and a prerequisite for wiser educational decisions.

Some critics of the notion of educational con-noisseurship have objected to what they see as a sense of elitism connoted by the term. Some have decried it as a privileging of outside experts with specialized backgrounds who offer deeper truths about the meanings inhabiting an educational setting than those available to practitioners and other inhabitants of the setting. It is doubly troublesome to critics when the notion of educational criticism is paired with that of educational connoisseurship. When the so-called insights of an outsider are inscribed into a privileged text, antidemocratic issues of power may come into play.

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