Connoisseurship

The Historical Context

Eisner's introduction of the ideas of connoisseurship and criticism into the discourse of the field of evaluation was part of a more general movement within the evaluation field in the United States and Europe (especially Great Britain) during the 1970s. During that time, there was a growing recognition that quasiexperimental design and other standard operating procedures of science might be inappropriate—or, at the very least, inadequate—for evaluating education and other social programs. Such procedures, critics charged, had difficulty accommodating the complexity of social phenomena and addressing the multiple values of different stakeholders.

The growing skepticism about traditional scientific approaches to evaluation encouraged a number of evaluation scholars to rethink the form and function of formal evaluation. These scholars were influenced by a wide variety of academic disciplines and fields, including anthropology, journalism, philosophy, and law, and they produced a number of evaluation models, including the naturalistic-constructivist approach, responsive evaluation, goal-free evaluation, and the adversary-advocate strategy. Elliot Eisner's rethinking of the evaluation process was influenced by the arts and aesthetics. He suggested that we could think of evaluators of educational programs as educational connoisseurs and the evaluation process as being analogous to art criticism.

The Components of Educational Criticism and Their Justification

According to Eisner, educational criticism (a term that Eisner used to refer both to a process and to the written product produced through that process) should have three components: description, interpretation, and evaluation.

The Descriptive Component. The descriptive component of educational criticism, according to Eisner, is different from the descriptive component of most other forms of qualitative inquiry, including those adapted from ethnography. As in art criticism, the emphasis in educational criticism is on using literary language and metaphor to capture the aesthetic (or “feeling”) dimensions of the phenomenon being evaluated. The goal is for the reader of educational criticism to be able to vicariously experience the phenomenon that is being evaluated at a visceral, not just an intellectual, level.

Eisner's thinking about the descriptive component of educational criticism was informed by the work of aesthetician Susanne Langer. Langer distinguished between two kinds of symbols that she labeled representational and presentational. Nonpoetic language and numbers are examples of representational symbols. Such symbols have no inherent meaning; rather, they receive their meaning through conventional [Page 77]association. As a result, representational symbols can only point to (represent) the phenomena they are referencing. Works of art, by contrast, are presentational symbols. In such symbols, meaning is inherent in the symbol itself. Even a Martian who had just arrived on earth would be able to “read” the colors, shapes, textures, and so on of a Picasso painting (assuming, of course, the Martian had the same sensory apparatus that we have).

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