Elliot Eisner

Elliot Wayne Eisner (1933 to 2014) was an American professor of art and education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and one of the leading academic voices on arts education, curriculum reform and qualitative research. Born in Chicago to a family of Russian Jewish immigrants, he took his master's degree in 1958 and his doctorate in 1962 at the University of Chicago, where he studied with Joseph Schwab, Bruno Bettelheim, Benjamin Bloom and Philip Jackson, and joined Stanford in 1965. From the 1960s he argued that schools neglected the arts because of standards and standardized testing, and proposed that art education be built on productive, critical and historical aspects. He supported Discipline-Based Art Education and stressed the importance of forms of representation, and he debated Denis Phillips on qualitative research and Howard Gardner on whether a novel could serve as a dissertation. He led bodies including the American Educational Research Association and the National Art Education Association, and received the Grawemeyer Award in 2005 and the Brock International Prize in 2004.