Chapter 1 - Eisner

1
Chapter 1 - Eisner

• Where are we heading?

2
The educational imagination

• The process of education always occurs within a
  context and decisions about educational practices
  need to be sensitive to that context.

3
Some items to ponder

• How does one make valid comparisons among
  students in programs that differ in content and
  in aims?
• Is a common standardized curriculum appropriate
  for a nation with 45 million students attending
  110,000 schools in which 2 ½ million teachers
  work?
• Is it fair to hold teachers and students
  accountable for achieving common outcomes in the
  face of such savage inequalities?

4
Policy

• Policymakers themselves often do not see and
  therefore do not know the people their policies
  affect.

5
Thorndike

• His work represented a vision of what he believed
  a science of behavior could do for the
  realization of social ambitions.
• Behavior is controllable
• Behavior can be shaped by method
• Philosophically compatible with the scientific
  management of human behavior

6
Dewey

• Growth was not the result of a set of externally
  reinforcing agents that Thorndike had described,
  but rather the outcome of an effort by the child
  to convert what Dewey called an indeterminate
  situation into a determinate one.
• Considering recipes for the classroom If
  students were uniform in background, desires, and
  aptitudes, recipes might be useful.

7
Tyler

• Tylers Basic Principles of Curriculum and
  Instruction published in 1949
• Tylers 4 ?s are fundamental to the concept of
  schooling
• What educational purposes should the school seek
  to attain?
• What educational experiences can be provided that
  are likely to attain these purposes?
• How can these educational experiences be
  effectively organized?
• How can we determine whether these purposes are
  being attained?

8
An examination of 3 beliefs

• American education costs too much. We spend more
  on our schools than any other country.
• American students are not doing as well as they
  once did in school in fact, they know far less
  than their parents did at the same age.
• Our educational position among nations lags far
  behind our economic competitors.

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The goal

• To complicate, not simplify
• Bring an appropriate uncertainty to mind as you
  think about the functions of education and the
  forms it can take