January 2004

Artistry in Teaching
A response to "The Pedagogy of Making," a Cultural Comment essay by Elizabeth Coleman.

by Elliot Eisner

Elizabeth Coleman's brief essay in many ways echoes the ideas of Sir Herbert Read, an English aesthetician, poet, historian, and pacifist. His idea that education at its best ought to be conceptualized as the preparation of artists was central to his philosophic work. When asked how much time should be devoted to art in the school, his answer was quick and direct. "All of it". By "all of it" Read meant that any aspect of the curriculum was, in some sense, an act of making. Making could be ideational or it could be material, but in either case, it was a constructed form and all constructed forms could participate, one way or another, in qualities having artistic character. By qualities having artistic character he meant qualities such as coherence, harmony, expressivity, skill, imagination. These are some of the features that can characterize work, whether in the province of physics or history or in ballet, poetry, or painting. The idea that things made could have rather profound aesthetic features was also related to the idea that excellence in teaching, indeed, that artistry in teaching, makes it possible for students to function as artists in any realm in which they work.

Now this perspective on teaching and its close cousin, schooling, is not salient in our conceptions of school improvement or of education's most important values. Elizabeth Coleman has it right when she says that "we spin our wheels when it comes to educational reform". Indeed, anyone interested in the history of education will tell you that wheel spinning has been ubiquitous in education. Part of the reason is that the improvement of schooling is more difficult than most people think. Another part of the reason is that the approaches that we have normally taken to school improvement has been largely mechanistic and technically rationalized approaches to both curriculum and to teaching. The United States Department of Education publishes missives titled, "What Works" as if to imply that work that works can be described or identified independent of the context in which what works is to be employed. Anyone who has worked with students knows experientially that context matters, indeed, context matters most in the "chemistry" that makes for educational effectiveness. Even to talk about effectiveness as though it were independent of the kind of intellectual values that schools ought to support, seems ill conceived. Thoughtful educators are not simply interested in achieving known effects; they are interested as much in surprise, in discovery, in the imaginative side of life and its development as in hitting predefined targets achieved through routine procedures. In some sense our aim ought to be to convert the school from an academic institution into an intellectual one. That shift in the culture of schooling would represent a profound shift in emphasis and in direction.

Artistry, therefore, can serve as a regulative ideal for education, a vision that adumbrates what really matters in schools. To conceive of students as artists who do their art in science, in the arts, or the humanities, is, after all, both a daunting and a profound aspiration. It may be that by shifting the paradigm of education reform and teaching from one modeled after the clocklike character of the assembly line into one that is closer to the studio or innovative science laboratory might provide us with a vision that better suits the capacities and the futures of the students we teach. It is in this sense, I believe, that the field of education has much to learn from the arts about the practice of education. It is time to embrace a new model for improving our schools.

Elliot Eisner is Professor of Education and Art at Stanford University. His research interests focus on the development of aesthetic intelligence and on the use of methods from the arts to study and improve educational practice. Originally trained as a painter, Dr. Eisner's teaching and research center around the ways in which schools might improve by using the processes of the arts in all their programs. He has written numerous books on the arts and education, including The Arts and the Creation of Mind (Yale University Press, 2002).