Connoisseurship

Connoisseurship is the skill the researcher must possess to conduct Elliot Eisner's arts-based methodology of educational criticism. Like an art critic, the educational critic perceives subtle qualitative distinctions. Through carefully crafted language, the critic enables a broad audience to see—and appreciate the educational importance of—these distinctions. Through deep expertise and subjective familiarity with the phenomenon under study, the critic has the ability to bring understanding and appreciation to a subject that might otherwise appear obtuse to the untrained eye.

The educational critic must address four areas of data analysis. First, the critic must provide a full and illuminating description of the phenomenon being studied. Second, the critic must offer an interpretation of how these details form a whole. How do the separate parts come together in a meaningful way? Third, the critic must then provide an evaluation of the goodness or worth of the phenomenon. Fourth, the critic must address thematics. These are overarching and enduring themes raised through the close study. The researcher must address all four areas to demonstrate competency as a connoisseur.

It is important that the critic achieve credibility with readers. The research must be believable. For the study to be worthy of research, the critic must address three dimensions of credibility: structural corroboration, referential adequacy, and consensual validation.

The first condition, structural corroboration, is a question of evidence. Is there sufficient information to sustain a clear argument through the dimensions of description, interpretation, evaluation, and thematics?

The second condition, referential adequacy, relates to the value of the argument for understanding other similar cases. Is our perception of practice sufficiently expanded by the research that we could recognize the features of the phenomenon outside the context of this particular study? Readers must be able to fruitfully apply the insights of the research to different contexts.

The third condition, consensual validation, is concerned with whether the research moves an informed audience to carefully discuss it. The value of the research lies in the broadening dialogue it initiates. A work of educational criticism is not the final word but rather a point of departure for more rewarding conversations.

The concepts of critic and connoisseur have proven to be controversial. In the popular imagination, art critics and connoisseurs are often authoritative intellectuals who render summative, callous, and nondebatable judgments. Eisner explicitly rejected such restrictive connotations of his terms. Nevertheless, feminist researchers found the language to be oppressive. Although deeply sympathetic to Eisner's advocacy for research unabashedly guided by deep subjective knowledge, they called for a more open, and less authoritative, terminology.

Educational criticism is the first fully developed arts-based research methodology. Connoisseurship has been highly influential in the development of other arts-based methodologies, including narrative storytelling and a/r/tography.