Important views of Eisner and his theories, thoughts, and knowledge. These have impacted my ways of thinking about art education.
Elliot Eisner (1933-2014) featured above was professor of Art Education and was one the Universe's greatest minds. He was known in many fields, Art education, Curriculum reform, and qualitative research.
Eisners Book The Arts and the Creation of Mind
“The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.”
Within his book mentioned above he talks about many important topics. I will list a few that are involved with my own teaching philosophy.
One focus that Eisner mentions his the attention to relationships. Within the section of What do the arts teach? It is found that relationships are one of them. After reading this section it was shown that while Eisner was talking about relations in art work and the mediums along with composition there were slight hints of the relativity of relationships within the world. Being open and seeing our world through a different lens is one of my many importance's in my philosophy. It is important that proportions are correct within a composition but it is more important that you see that relativity of the proportions in world.
Eisner also goes in depth about representation, though it it not directly listed in my philosophy, representation is very important with in education. He talks about the different ways that it can affect art work created. Memetic “refers to forms that look or sound like what they are intended to represent” these could be things from culture, such as popular culture around the time the artwork is complete. But also the way of representing imagery and turning it into a meaning. The second is expressive form, this is the representation of feeling. By using certain elements, like line, color, shape, value, and texture it can strike different feelings within our brains. Like the Gestalt theory, “the forms that artists create generate fields of energy that our picked up by our nervous system. Finally, are conventional signs. These are symbols that are agreed upon by society that can refer to ideas, objects, and or events.
Third I like to focus on how the arts affect students cognitively along with development. The first way that the arts can influence the cognitive development is through the function of the arts that is to help us to learn and notice the world. We are then looking at the world in a different perspective than before. “Art provides the conditions for awakening to the world around us” and we are able to connect more with the world around us and begin “knowing”. The second point that Eisner brought to the table, was that the arts help to create a stabilization that would otherwise be lost. It enables us to look more closely “at our own ideas”, and it doesn’t matter where those ideas or thoughts come from, whether “language, music, or vision”. Lastly, the arts “are a means of exploring our own interior landscape” and thinking about our past experiences and tying them together.
Eisner was a brilliant man, and had lots of ideas that are still flourishing today. It is an honor that I can continue my studies in art education and follow in such great footsteps.
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