ABSTRACT
In 1967, Elliot Eisner initiated the Kettering Project, providing visual art instructional materials for untrained elementary teachers. The project's two key assumptions were that the most important contribution that can be made by the visual arts to a child's education is that which is inherent to art and that the curriculum should attend not only to the productive domain but to the aesthetic, critical and historical domains as well. These ideas were a precursor of what would become the dominant art approach in the 1990s – discipline-based art education. Eisner has also contributed to school reform in three major ways. First he advocated moving beyond technocratic and behaviouristic modes of thinking. Second, he warned against reliance on slogans or educational fads. Eisner's third main contribution was in his role as a cognitive pluralist. He showed that the impoverished mind is one that has few symbol systems or forms of representation at its disposal.
