Eisner SIG Newsletter

Email: eisnersig@gmail.com
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Greetings to all Elliot Eisner SIG members!

This is a brief word to inform you that it is our goal to communicate with you at least three times yearly through newsletter. In keeping with Elliot Eisner's interests in surprise and productive idiosyncrasies, we intend to vary each newsletter with stories, poems, and other kinds of information.

Also, a quick reminder: please help us grow our membership! Invite your friends and colleagues to join the EE SIG. Finally, our work on the 2016 AERA conference is taking shape. Be on the lookout for more information on our website and upcoming newsletters.

Bruce Uhrmacher

Interim Chair

Professor of Research Methods and Education

Morgridge College of Education

University of Denver

All are welcome to the Eisner SIG Business Meeting. Dr. Joel Westheimer will discuss the relationships between the work of Elliot Eisner and the 2016 Annual Meeting theme, "Public Scholarship to Educate Diverse Democracies." Attendees will have input into the direction of the SIG as we discuss a variety of business matters.

Click here to discover more about Dr. Westheimer, University Research Chair in the Sociology of Education at the University of Ottawa, Canada.

You can also follow him on Twitter @joelwestheimer

By Dan Conn, Assistant Professor of Teacher Education & Human Performance

Minot State University

During a tribute to Elliot Eisner at the 2014 American Association of Teaching and Curriculum (AATC) Annual Conference in Tampa Bay, FL, I felt this calling (Hansen, 1995) to bring the concept of educational connoisseurship and criticism back to my students at Minot State University. Consequently, I took my undergraduate reading foundations course on a field trip to the local brewery for a lesson on connoisseurship, where we discussed the aesthetics of teaching and learning- particularly with regard to approaching literacy. Later in the semester, three students− Camilla Keller, Cheryl Mortezaee (now Cheryl Shanahan), and Malia Salyards- chose to further investigate the aesthetics of literacy. Feeling that their literature reviews had strong potential, I offered to partner with each of the students to develop their ideas for a presentation at 2015 AATC Annual Conference in Portland, ME.

Building from the lesson sketch design articulated by Uhrmacher, Conrad, and Moroye (2013), which is grounded in Uhrmacher’s (2009) Toward a Theory of Aesthetic Learning Experiences, Cheryl and I asked, “How does the lesson sketch design affect the practice of labeling students?” We noticed the lesson sketch does not call for specific objectives; instead, it focuses on broader strokes based on teacher intentions. Thus, we investigated how the practice of applying broader strokes to define educational aims affect the use of labels associated with ability grouping. While we found both advantages and disadvantages to using labels to describe educational circumstances, labels have a way of concealing qualities or limiting possibilities. Through the lesson sketch design, we found examples where balancing process with product reduced the need for labeling students.

Also engendered from Uhrmacher’s (2009) previous work, Camilla and I explored the question, “How can sensory experiences affect long term memory?”. We shared our encounters with using the lesson sketch design (Uhrmacher, Conrad, and Moroye, 2013) from our respective student teacher and professor perspectives. Camilla, presently student teaching, especially focused on using sensory experiences to elicit prior knowledge with her students, and I discussed my experiences of using CRISPA in a writer’s workshop for 6th graders. CRIPSA stands for: connections, risk-taking, imagination, perceptivity, sensory experience, and active engagement. Uhrmacher (2009) points to these themes as needed for an aesthetic experience in the classroom. Both Dan and Camilla plan to continue using the lesson sketch and the CRIPSA themes on a regular basis. In fact, some students at Minot State University were using a lesson sketch found on the CRIPSA website (http://www.crispateaching.org) in another writer’s workshop with the Reading Connections Family Carousel during the time of the AATC Conference.

In her literature review from class, Malia read Eisner’s What does it mean to say a school is doing well? (2001), and she wanted to know what does it mean to read well. In consulting the literature, we were impressed with Roseblatt’s (1994) attention to aesthetic dimensions in literacy and felt an aesthetic lens is sorely needed in our schools today. During the discussion aspect of our presentation, Malia and I asked how we could evaluate reading through an aesthetic lens? As Eisner stated:

If the child is viewed as an art product and the teacher as a critic, one task of the teacher would be to reveal the qualities of the child to himself and to others. In addition, the teacher as a critic would appraise the changes occurring in the child. But because the teacher’s task includes more than just criticism, he would be responsible, in part ,for the improvement for the work of art. (Eisner, 1967, p. 91).

We wondered if there is a way to offer evaluation about literacy that could capture both qualities of the child reading and point toward improvement. Professor Bruce Uhrmacher, of Denver University, attended our session and suggested we use haikus to evaluate aesthetic dimensions of reading. Haiku’s juxtapose two themes, Bruce went on to say, which allows for appreciation and improvement. In seventeen syllables or less, teachers can provide feedback designed to foster artistry.

Already Malia and I have worked to develop the haiku as a form of evaluation. In fact, in my elementary education language arts methods course, Malia helped me design a lesson where we created haiku’s based on sample student work. Additionally, I wrote haikus to all of my methods students with midterm feedback, and Malia and a couple other students responded with haikus back to me. Malia and I are now busy trying to design a study to further investigate the pairing haiku’s with aesthetic dimensions of literacy before she leaves to student teach in Las Vegas, NV for the spring semester.

As she approaches the end of her student teaching experience, Camilla continues to seek ways to incorporate CRISPA themes in the classroom and hopes to travel around to observe teachers using aesthetic approaches to teaching and learning. Camilla has also implemented several concepts from the conference, including the ideas box by Professor Christine Woyschner of Temple University. By incorporating the box into her classroom, she has received positive feedback on what the students want to learn ranging from health and organization skills to an interest in ancient Chinese religion. Also nearing the end of her student teaching, Cheryl is struggling with the prevailing framework in which students are labeled based on educational objectives. In response, Cheryl is working with students labeled “low” in reading through a book club, where she hopes to help them defy the limitations of the “low” label. After observing Cheryl in action with the book club, it appears as though several labels have been defied. As the ripples of Eisner, Uhrmacher, Conrad, and Moroye sweep across of rolling plains of North Dakota, these three young scholars- Cheryl, Camilla, and Malia- pave the way.

Camilla Keller, Malia Salyards, Bruce Uhrmacher, Cheryl Shanahan, and Dan Conn at the American Association for Teaching and Curriculum Annual Conference in Portland, ME.