According to Eisner (1991), there are two concepts involved in educational evaluation, and these are educational connoisseurship and educational criticism. The educational connoisseurship is likened to the art of evaluation appreciation, which purpose is to gain an awareness of the qualifications that comprise an object or a project. Appreciation does not necessarily mean liking something; rather, it means having an understanding and an awareness of what one has experienced, which then becomes the basis for judgment.
As an example, conducting a qualitative research that uses the observation method would require the researcher to appreciate and be aware of what they are observing so that they may be able to better understand the phenomenon they are observing. This would in turn enable them to gain better insights of it. As a concrete example, when a researcher observes two math classrooms where one uses the traditional form of teaching math and another uses storytelling as the method of teaching, the researcher is not in a position to criticize either method if their goal is to truly understand which method is more effective at helping students learn math. At the stage of gathering data, the researcher must be able to appreciate the educational program by becoming aware of what is going on in the classroom. To become aware or to appreciate the phenomenon being observed or the data being gathered, the researcher has to be aware of how the teacher conducts the class, how the students respond to the teacher, how well the students do in tests, what type of atmosphere is created in the classroom, and others. By becoming fully aware of these things and by being able to appreciate them, the researcher is better able to make an evaluation of whether the teaching strategy used in the classroom is effective or not.
On the other hand, educational criticism is pertained to as the art of disclosing the quality of objects or events that connoisseurship perceives. It does not necessarily mean making negative comments but it refers more to reproducing an object’s perception. It means attempting to provide various viewpoints to an object or event.
Using the same example as above, a researcher who observes two math classrooms that employ two different strategies for teaching math can use educational criticism in the evaluation of a program during the analysis phase. After observing the two classrooms, the researcher must determine which method was more effective. In this regard, the researcher can use educational connoisseurship to determine the more effective method by comparing the results from the observations of the two classrooms. Naturally, the class that achieved better learning outcomes may be considered as employing the more effective strategy for teaching math. However, when the researcher tries to analyze which method was more effective in a generalized sense, then the researcher has to employ educational criticism. For example, if the storytelling method proved to be more effective in terms of the observed students’ learning outcomes, the researcher must critique these findings by taking the context into consideration. Assuming that the study was conducted in private school classrooms, the critical researcher would then have to ask whether the same results would be obtained if the classrooms were in a public or inner city school. If the storytelling method was more effective than the traditional method among private school students, will inner city school students also find the storytelling method more effective? In this way, the researcher is able to evaluate whether the process and the results can be repeated.
In conclusion, both the concepts of educational connoisseurship and educational criticism are important in qualitative research. While the former enables the researcher to evaluate an educational program for what it is, the latter enables the researcher to evaluate an educational program from different viewpoints, that is, if it can be repeated under different contexts. These two concepts make for a holistic evaluation of educational programs.
References
Eisner, E. W. (1991). The enlightened eye: Qualitative inquiry and the enhancement of
educational practice. Toronto.
