Educational Imaginaton, The

The Educational Imagination: On the Design and Evaluation of School Programs (1979, 1985, 1994) is perhaps the most influential book authored by Elliot Eisner in the field of curriculum studies. The book has been widely viewed as greatly contributing to the development and advancement of a school of thought that highlights the importance of aesthetic theory in thinking about curriculum design and program evaluation. Indeed, in 2000, the Museum of Education [Page 315]at the University of South Carolina designated it as one of the significant books of the 20th century.

The Educational Imagination represents Eisner's most successful attempt at bringing his background in the arts (especially the visual arts) to bear on the field of curriculum studies. Although some of the groundbreaking ideas within it were presaged in his earlier writings and public addresses, the book applied an aesthetic approach to educational planning, teaching, and curriculum evaluation in a single textual space. The book thereby presented a coherent alternative to the dominant systematic, science-based tradition of curriculum development, instructional delivery, and assessment of learning.

At the heart of this alternative approach is an emphasis on the importance of the aesthetic elements of imagination, nuance, and context in matters of curriculum. This emphasis was evident throughout, as Eisner made the case for (a) the mapping of a variegated field consisting of six curriculum ideologies, (b) a planning process that welcomed the possibilities of emergent and unpredictable outcomes, (c) the inevitable presence of the null (or untaught) curriculum, (d) a view of teaching as an art rather than as a science, and (e) the perception of subtleties in curriculum commonplaces through educational connoisseurship and within the genre of curriculum evaluation called educational criticism, the use of artistic media in disclosing what has been perceived.

Eisner suggested that curriculum planning and evaluation occur within any of several of what he (first and second editions) called orientations, and later (third edition) ideologies. Each ideology is inevitably value saturated and always, in a democratic society, in competition with the others. These belief systems are, however, rarely fully articulated and publicized; nor, therefore, are the educational aims and goals that flow from them. They are, nevertheless, important to understanding what Eisner identified as the three kinds of curricula taught in schools: the explicit, the implicit, and the null curriculum. The latter notion includes the wide range of items that are neglected or undertaught, within schools. Eisner's conception of the null curriculum may have (at least partly) emerged out of his lifelong advocacy for the arts in public schools, a subject often considered frivolous rather than basic to the curriculum.

A third important contribution to the field of curriculum studies in The Educational Imagination concerns the use of advanced organizers in curriculum planning. Through this book, Eisner popularized and refined his earlier arguments against the dominant view of behavioral objectives as the singularly sanctioned formulation of curricular aims in the planning process. Eisner offered an alternative set of possibilities for identifying educational aspirations within curriculum planning. This was the notion of the expressive outcome. Expressive outcomes, argued Eisner, are not statements of final outcomes specified prior to an educational activity. Instead, they arise within and through educational activities that allow for an array of unpredictable but productive outcomes.

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