Chapter 7: To Have and Have Not: Critical Distance and Emotional Proximity

In this chapter I want to start laying down some caveats to what I am saying when I propose the personalisation of evaluative enquiry. To do this I will contrast what I advocate with Elliott Eisner’s model of connoisseurship and educational criticism. I will describe the model later, but first I need to set a context, but we may note now that Eisner’s approach is probably the one which celebrates more than any other the individualism of the evaluator. It is certainly one in which the values of the evaluator are written directly into the methodology and in which, above all, the evaluator is expected to discover a personal voice.