Eisner SIG Newsletter

The purpose of the Eisner SIG is to promote scholarship that applies, extends, critiques, and reinvents Eisner's scholarly contributions and core principles toward the overarching aim of school improvement.

Email: eisnersig@gmail.com
Website: http://bit.ly/1CTpCVV
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Twitter: @EisnerSIG

• Message from Dr. David Flinders, Elliot Eisner SIG Chair
• Call for Nominations: SIG Chair
• Call for Applicants: SIG Recruitment Committee
• Featured Business Meeting Speaker: Dr. Peter Hlebowitsh
• Member Spotlights: Johnny Saldaña, Professor Emeritus, Arizona State University; Alicia Brianna Saxe, Doctoral Student, University of Denver; Bradley Conrad, Associate Professor, Capital University

Let me begin by thanking all of our members who submitted to the SIG this year. We received 13 submissions and were allowed to accept 8 submissions for presentation at the 2019 annual meeting. As in recent years, the pool of submissions this year was intellectually strong and often innovative. Special thanks goes to our Program Chair, Derek Gottlieb, who ensured that every submission was appropriately reviewed and deliberatively considered on its own merits. Appreciation also goes to our submission reviewers who included (but were not limited to) the following:

Lilian Linialy Chimuma

Karenanna Boyle Creps

Robert Donmoyer

Dana Lewis Haraway

David McGough

Alan Tinkler

Joseph Zajdel

Aaron Zimmerman

Michelle Zoss

I have three additional announcements. First, our leadership team has made recruitment of new SIG members a top priority. Together with the other SIG members, we highly value the Elliot Eisner SIG as a home for those committed to epistemological diversity and the promise of educational research to inform school improvement. For this reason, we are seeking volunteers to serve on the Elliot Eisner SIG Recruitment Committee. The Committee’s charge will be to generate and promote processes for attracting and welcoming new members. Details for self-nominations are included in this newsletter.

Second, it is time for our SIG to field a slate of at least two candidates for a new SIG Chair for inclusion in the next AERA general election. The SIG Chair serves a 2-year term, and is responsible for the general administration of the SIG as well as for presiding over meetings of the leadership team and at the Annual Business Meeting. Please consider nominating yourself or any SIG member who would be appropriate to serve in this position. Again, a brief call for nominations is included below.

Finally, I am happy to announce that Derek Gottlieb has recruited Dr. Peter Hlebowitsh, Education Dean at the University of Alabama, to serve as our keynote speaker for the annual meeting in Toronto. Dr. Hlebowitsh is widely known and highly regarded for his scholarship in educational foundations, curriculum theory, and curriculum development. He is the author of Radical Curriculum Theory Reconsidered (Teachers College Press, 1993); Designing the School Curriculum (Allyn Bacon, 2005); and, Foundation of American Education (Kendall-Hunt, 2007).

I close with thanks to Derek and the rest of the leadership team—Tammy Cline, Jodie Wilson, and Aaron Zimmerman. Their exemplary service and commitment to the SIG are greatly appreciated.

David J. Flinders

Professor of Curriculum Studies

Indiana University

Description: The SIG Chair serves a 2-year term, and is responsible for the general administration of the SIG as well as for presiding over meetings of the leadership team and at the Annual Business Meeting. Please consider nominating yourself or any SIG member who would be appropriate to serve in this position. The deadline for nominations is November 20.

We are seeking interested members to serve on the Recruitment Committee for the SIG. Responsibilities would include generating and promoting ideas to welcome and retain new members. This is a great opportunity for graduate students! If you are interested, please email Jodie Wilson at eisnersig@gmail.com by November 30. Your support and consideration are greatly appreciated.

The Elliot Eisner SIG is honored to welcome noted curriculum scholar Dr. Peter S. Hlebowitsh, Dean and Professor of the College of Education, University of Alabama, as the featured speaker at our business meeting in Toronto. Hlebowitsh is the author of Designing the School Curriculum and Foundations of American Education. He has served on the editorial board for the Journal of Curriculum Studies and is a past secretary for the John Dewey Society.

Everyone is welcome to attend, and we hope you will make plans to join us. More information on the specific day, time, and location will be forthcoming.

1. Why are you a member of the SIG?

As a theatre educator and artist, I join the arts-related SIGs of AERA to network with like-minded colleagues and to stay informed of current trends in arts-based and arts education research. The Elliot Eisner SIG in particular offers me the opportunity to connect with those who acknowledge Dr. Eisner as one of the most significant figures in educational research. I was fortunate to hear him speak at local and national venues and was captivated with his authenticity, humility, and gentle humor.

2. How has Eisner influenced your own thinking/research?

I was introduced to Eisner’s work through one of his former students and collaborators: Tom Barone, a colleague of mine at Arizona State University, who also instructed the first qualitative research methods course I took. Several of Eisner’s works were required and recommended reading, and The Enlightened Eye: Qualitative Inquiry and the Enhancement of Educational Practice awoke my sensibilities to how the arts serve as a legitimate research epistemology.

A later collection, The Kind of Schools We Need: Personal Essays, included inspirational pieces such as “The Arts and Their Role in Education,” “Cognition and Representation,” and “Rethinking Educational Research.” Selected works by Dr. Eisner became required reading in my own research methods courses, for I felt strongly that masters and doctoral students in theatre education needed to know one of the most influential and inspirational figures in qualitative inquiry and the arts.

Elliot Eisner made elusive topics such as epistemology, theory, and aesthetics accessible for me. His elegant writing helped me comprehend and rearticulate to others the necessity of the arts for young people. I am grateful for his scholarship and its influence on my own projects in grades K-12 theatre education and arts-based educational research.

3. Describe your current research/publications.

I recently completed an introductory textbook with my colleague, Matt Omasta: Qualitative Research: Analyzing Life (Sage Publications, 2018). In our unique approach, qualitative data analysis is the through-line; we introduce it in the very first chapter and teach additional analytic methods in each successive chapter. We noticed that virtually all introduction to qualitative research methods textbooks reserved analysis as a latter subtopic. But our teaching experience informed us that data analysis is one of the most elusive processes for students. Thus, we instruct it at the very beginning and throughout the curriculum to strengthen students’ analytic proficiency. https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/qualitative-research/book245811

My most recent publication is a volume for Routledge’s “World Library of Educationalists” series: Writing Qualitatively: The Selected Works of Johnny Saldaña (Routledge, 2018), which includes 18 articles, book chapters, and excerpts from longer works published between 1999 and 2017. The first half of the book includes traditional qualitative research content (case studies, action research, etc.), while the second half anthologizes my arts-based research representations in reader’s theatre, poetry, ethnodrama, and autoethnography. https://www.routledge.com/Writing-Qualitatively-The-Selected-Works-of-Johnny-Saldana/Saldana/p/book/9781138486249

1. Why are you a member of the SIG?

I am a member of the Eisner SIG because, like Eisner, I believe in “new visions of educational inquiry” for the purpose of developing “new forms of pedagogical practice” (Eisner, 2017, p. 245). Although I never had the fortune of meeting him, there is something about his ideas and dreams for education that I feel connected to. Being a part of this SIG is important to me because it reminds me that there is work to do in education and research, hard work, but that we don't and shouldn’t do it alone.

2. How has Eisner influenced your own thinking/research?

An easier question is how has Eisner not influenced my own thinking and research. In essence, I left the classroom to pursue further education and research due to my frustration with high stakes testing, which I felt pressured to conform to against what I felt and knew was morally right or fair. Eisner reminded me that this is not a new problem in schools, but rather a legacy of outside influences, which are driven by motives outside of what I would hope for a good education system, such as blind obedience and capitalistic gains. Eisner (2017) describes this frustration perfectly, “Yet so much of what is suggested to teachers and school administrators is said independent of context and often by those ignorant of the practices they wish to improve,” (p. 11). Acknowledging the politics of education and research is important, but Eisner has taught me that acknowledgment is not enough. We have to fight and we have to be smart about it.

3. Describe your current research/publications.

My current research addresses the role of the universities and researchers in community-driven initiatives. Specifically, I am interested in how researchers can support schools and the communities they serve in a collaborative manner that attends to immediate school needs. I am curious of the impact that these partnership models may have on curriculum, instruction, and learning and what potential there is in university-school partnerships to address inequity and inequality in the public school system.

1. Why are you a member of the SIG?

While I love coming to AERA, it can at times feel so large and at times impersonal. The Eisner SIG is a place where I feel like I am part of a group of people who are thoughtful, creative, caring, and authentic. I think the SIG strikes a delicate balance between being intellectually rigorous and yet a caring, nurturing environment where mentoring and connection making is valued. Collectively we share many of the values and ideas Elliot Eisner espoused in his own life: a desire to improve education, an appreciation for the aesthetic, an understanding for the value of qualitative inquiry, and many others. The Eisner SIG is like my intellectual family.

2. How has Eisner influenced your own thinking/research?

He has influenced me in countless ways. Educational Criticism and Connoisseurship has been my preferred research method and we have even begun to tinker with it in different ways on various projects to push his ideas on this method even further. For example, a fellow Eisner SIG member and I are working on utilizing Ed Crit in conjunction with cross-case analysis to paint a picture through narrative of cross-case study themes. We’ll see how it goes, but I think it has promise.

I have also always felt a strong connection in Elliot’s belief that our work as researchers and scholars should consider how we can improve education. For me, that is of the utmost importance in what I do in my work. In a similar vein, I have frequently utilized Eisner’s Ecology of Schooling when developing or evaluating educational environments and/or programs. This framework is so perfect in helping us identify coherencies or incoherencies in those contexts. It has allowed me to clearly see how important it is to align aims with curriculum, pedagogy, temporal and physical structures, and evaluation. Who I am as a professional is incredibly influenced by Elliot.

3.Describe your current research/publications.

I have been working on a number of projects, including a book on lesson planning with fellow Eisner SIG members Bruce Uhrmacher and Christy McConnell. We’re bringing some of Elliot’s ideas into the fold there in illustrating the importance of focusing on the aesthetic elements of lesson planning with a focus on meaningful student experience.

I am also working on a large scale project that includes many Eisner SIG members called the Tales from the Classroom Project. This project is focused on improving education by sharing the stories of those in classrooms across the U.S. through dissemination of information via multimedia. It includes a peer-reviewed blog (www.talesfromtheclassroom.com), robust social media platform to utilize for public pedagogy and relationship building, and a forthcoming edited book that examines how policies on accountability and standardization affect students, teachers, administrators, and parents/communities across 11 rural, suburban, and urban elementary, middle, and high schools across the U.S.

In the Eisnerian spirit of seeking to improve schools, we have started other branches of this project. One such branch is the research renderings project where we are assembling a library of “renderings” that disseminates for K-12 practitioners scholarly research and theoretical work in an accessible way. The renderings are brief, highly concentrated descriptions of a study or theoretical work with a personal connection made by the author of the short piece. They are designed to share with teachers, administrators, school counselors, and even parents the cutting edge and influential work being done by education scholars.

The other such branch is the portraits of good education, which again are aimed at K-12 educators but in this case they utilize narrative description and some analysis to illustrate for readers what good education looks like. These pieces are still brief in nature but dense in what they illustrate and analyze. The hope with these, like with the research renderings, is to improve education.

We have been growing exponentially in the year since this project began and hope to continue to grow by adding folks interested in writing on the blog, writing renderings/portraits, serving on the editorial advisory board, and eventually joining our consulting team. I believe deeply that it is through such grassroots efforts and organizing, finding a common cause, that we can truly improve schools. For me, that aim that Elliot espoused is what gives me purpose.

Would you like to contribute to the next Eisner SIG Newsletter? We would appreciate hearing how you are applying, extending, and/or reinventing Eisner's scholarship. Please send submissions to Jodie Wilson, Morgridge College of Education, University of Denver.