Elliot Eisner's Lost Legacy In Memoriam

Because of Elliot Eisner's recent passing, it seems appropriate to note that he actually began his signature work on arts-based research by writing about program evaluation. This article revisits Eisner's evaluation ideas and briefly considers why Eisner's thinking about evaluation has had a relatively limited long-term impact on the evaluation field. The article also demonstrates that at least some of Eisner's arts-based strategies can be effective evaluation tools when certain modifications are made and that Eisner's thinking is important even for evaluators who are not inclined to use techniques and strategies associated with the arts.