Customer Reviews

The Enlightened Eye: Qualitative Inquiry and the Enhancement of Educational Practice

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Designed as a text for education courses, The Enlightened Eye should be on everyone's reading list. The power of the author, Elliot Eisner, to convey ideas that are normally limited to esoteric "research" courses, and the "elite" graduate students who inhabit that world, is remarkable and refreshing. Through artistic and poetic imagery, the author transports the reader to a world of knowing that lies at the heart of connoisseur-ship and critical inquiry. Through a lens that distinguishes between seeing and looking we embark on a journey of discovery -- a journey that begins and ends in the qualities of our everyday experience. In sum, Elliot Eisner, provides a vehicle that guides us through the processes of decoding and encoding the meanings attached to "experience," including the objects that reside in that experience. It is a book that is a pleasure to read because the author writes well, seduces the reader, and provides opportunities for serious reflection. In sum, Elliot Eisner takes us on a qualitative journey discovery, through which we uncover the qualities of our life and our society. Buy it. Read it. Savor it.

If you have encountered ambiguity in seeking objectivity, Elliot Eisner's book offers an articulate guide to understanding how we "know". Certainly a bible for any researcher but also accessible for anyone interested in learning. A mind tingling and most worthy read!

I have just read an extract from this book on Eisner's six features of qualitative inquiry (6 pages) and was rather horrified at the sort of qualitative researcher that he envisions replacing the problematic scientistic ideals. From the frying pan into the fire, if you ask me. Rather than humbling the researcher's role vis a vis knowledge, other people and perspectives, Eisner suggests these research 'experts' should see the 'self as an instrument' and aspire to take on all the pretensions to originality, deep insight, profundity and faux superiority of yesteryear artists. For Eisner, the (unfathomable) 'sensibilities' and 'connoisseurship' skills of the qualitative researcher and their 'personal' 'unique insight' should be recognised as a 'higher good'. Quite how he justifies his own particular hierarchical faith in the superiority of the expert's 'astute' insight from the terribly homogenising 'belief in the single right one' of conventional evaluative criteria, is not clear to me. Of course it doesn't seem to occur to him that one man's (sic) insight might well be another's poopycock. Anyway, I should've expected something like this given the title.
But what strikes me about this approach is that it seems out of joint with the directions of our times. I doubt many people (at least those not aspiring to be an expert) are going to be any more convinced than i was by this new brand of expertise than the much criticised scientistic form. I suspect people would rather a change in the relation of power with experts than another choice of flavour.