文档介绍：REFLECTIONS AND RECOLLECTIONS Q 135
Concerns and aspirations for qualitative
research in the new millennium R
Qualitative Research
Copyright ©
SAGE Publications
(London,
Thousand Oaks,ca
and New Delhi)
vol. (): -.
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() :;
ELLIOT W. EISNER -; ]
Stanford University, California
This essay describes some of my concerns and aspirations for qualitative
research as we move into the next millennium. The exploration and
promotion of qualitative research has been an important focus of my
intellectual life. In fact, it has been a part of my intellectual life long before I
became a doctoral student at the University of Chicago in the late 1950s.
My interest in qualitative matters started in elementary school when I
discovered that I had developed a love affair with art. That love affair
eventually led me to a part-time position working with inner-city children as
a teacher of arts and crafts, and from there to the study of education and the
role of the arts in its promotion. In this transition, the arts and other
qualitative considerations were deeply integrated into my way of thinking
about education.
The Department of Education at the University of Chicago, at the time I
enrolled, did not offer courses in qualitative methods. I cannot remember ever
hearing the term ‘qualitative research’. The Department at Chicago was a
part of the division of the social sciences and its relationship with the social
science division of the university was cherished and protected by the faculty.
Research was what the faculty was to do and research meant doing the kind
of work that real social scientists did. This meant doing work that used
statistical methods to measure the effects of experiments, correlational
studies to determine the magnitude of association among variables, and that
employed assumptions about the ‘discovery of knowledge’ that were standard
fare in the social sciences. Indeed, m