Eisner, Elliot

(b. 1933, Chicago, Illinois). Ph.D. and M.A. Education, University of Chicago; M.S. Art Education, Illinois Institute of Technology; B.A. Art and Education, Roosevelt University.

Eisner is Lee Jacks Professor of Education and Art at Stanford University. He has been a faculty member at the University of Chicago and The Ohio State University and a high school art teacher in Chicago.

Eisner has contributed to the field of evaluation through promoting and furthering arts education and developing the role of artistic thinking in the conduct of social science research. He has influenced the field through his use of the arts in framing educational goals and curriculum development, and he developed the connoisseurship approach for educational evaluation. His seminal work The Educational Imagination: On the Design and Evaluation of School Programs made possible a new expert approach to evaluation, one based on the capacity of artistically rendered forms to illuminate complex and subtle educational practices and, as a result, to provide opportunities for more useful evaluation. Eisner's development of educational connoisseurship and educational criticism made way for the articulation of the concept forms of representation, through which he illustrated the uses and limits of representation as a form of communication.

He is the author of many publications that have influenced evaluation theory and practice, as well as art education, qualitative research, and curriculum theory, including The Educational Imagination, The Enlightened Eye, Cognition and Representation, and Do American Schools Need Standards? Eisner is on the advisory board of the J. Paul Getty Center for Education in the Arts and the editorial advisory board of Kappan and is the consulting editor of Curriculum Perspectives. He is a member of the editorial board of Critical Inquiry into Curriculum and Instruction and the editorial advisory board of Just and Caring Education and is the former president of the John Dewey Society, the American Educational Research Association, the International Society for Education Through Art, and the National Art Education [Page 123]Association. Eisner has been awarded five honorary doctorates.