Elliot Eisner - what can education learn from the arts about the practice of education?

"the aim of education ought to be conceived of as the preparation of artists. By the term artist neither he nor I mean necessarily painters and dancers, poets and playwrights. We mean individuals who have developed the ideas, the sensibilities, the skills, and the imagination to create work that is well proportioned, skilfully executed, and imaginative, regardless of the domain in which an individual works. The highest accolade we can confer upon someone is to say that he or she is an artist whether as a carpenter or a surgeon, a cook or an engineer, a physicist or a teacher. The fine arts have no monopoly on the artistic."

- Elliot Eisner

for the entire transcription of his speech, given in 2002 at Stanford University, go HERE.

AP's versus our curriculum

Interesting issue has come up recently in school. Found out that colleges check out the scores our students get on their AP portfolio and compare them to the grades we give them in our classes. For instance, if the average score of our students in AP 3D design is a 4.2 and I happen to give them a B- average for my AP Ceramics class, then my ceramics program would be valued at a much higher rate than if my students averaged a 2.8 on the AP and I gave them an A- (my course would effectively be considered a joke...and probably for good reason)

So, the implications for this seem to be:

1. Discourage kids who we know will do poorly (and even average) on the AP from submitting their portfolio. Only 4's and 5's should take it.

The big issue is we don't know what grade a kid will get. My best student in 15 years of teaching received a 4, while one of my most distracted, unproductive kid received a 3 - both were scores they received were jokes! My grades for them (A and C+) respectively both hurt and helped my program - but not in the way I thought...

2. Lower the grades of my students.

We already have a difficult time as it is attracting students to stay with the visual arts into the upper levels because colleges don't value the class in the same way they do other courses of study. If we were to lower their GPA's artificially, we would lose them altogether...