Elliot Eisner: Proponent of Surprise (1933–2014)

Elliot Eisner was a painter and an educator who thought across and through disciplines of art and education. As an educational thinker, Eisner learned from theorists who would ultimately guide his intellect and foster his appreciation for how the arts impacted learning. His own connoisseurship, sense of critique, and belief in experiential learning produced expressive outcomes in the students he nurtured, who would later carry on his legacy. The attention he paid to curriculum led him toward crafting a program of study that embraced artful practices for teachers unskilled in the arts. The intent, he wrote, was to help teachers inform their students of how the arts might enrich and inform lived experiences. In his thinking, the arts possessed a unique interpretability revealed in the process of artmaking. His contention held that artistic methods enveloped the potential to awaken pluralistic approaches to teaching and learning, stretching the boundaries of explorative practice, and eventually leading to knowing and understanding. Eisner’s agility with ideation and with words made him a thinker who imagined concepts like arts-based research that challenged normative qualitative practices. The contributions he endowed education through and with the arts embraced flexible, creative pathways for discovery; he was ever the proponent of surprise.