Beyond the Explicit, Implicit, and Null Curricula: Elliot Eisner’s Contributions to Religious Education

Religious educators frequently cite Elliot Eisner, the late Stanford University professor of arts and education, for his framework of the three different “curricula”—explicit, implicit, and null—operating in any teaching/learning context (Eisner [1979] 1994). Many of us appreciate his articulation of the multiple levels on which teaching and learning take place because it names a reality that religious educators recognize intuitively: namely, that in education, and especially religious education, there is always more going on than meets the eye! Maria Harris (1987), for example, expressed this “more than meets the eye” aspect of education in her attention to esthetics and the importance of intentionally designing educational spaces because a space itself teaches. Mai-Anh Le Tran (2017, 2015) addresses Eisner’s paradigm through her concern to get beneath the surface of language proclaiming religious education as liberatory; to examine its practices of teaching and learning for ways its explicit, implicit, and null pedagogies may be complicit in violence. Eisner’s identification of the three curricula in play in any educational moment puts words to a form of analysis common among scholars and practitioners of religious education. Harris and Tran provide but two of many such examples of the generativity of Eisner’s framework for our field.

It bears noting, however, that Eisner’s importance to the field of religious education extends beyond this popular framework alone. His work on educational evaluation and qualitative research lifts up a number of the same concerns many religious educators voice about the marginalization of alternative theories of mind and forms of knowledge compared with those privileged by quantifiable measures. For instance, in a concise but prescient essay from 1992, Eisner offered his critique of the educational reform movement in US schooling then known as “America 2000.” This movement, which was the conceptual predecessor to the “No Child Left Behind” policy enacted into US law in 2001, focused on standards-based testing as the key to improving public education in America. Eisner’s critique identified five erroneous beliefs about mind, knowledge, and intelligence informing the America 2000 educational reform movement: “[the idea] that thought requires language, that sensory experience is a low-level function, that logic is necessary for intelligence, that detachment and distance foster understanding, and that science is the only legitimate way to generalize” (Eisner 1992, 593). For Eisner the arts offer a clear example of a way of knowing that does not fall prey to such errors. He lifts up four “common, core contributions of the arts and their potential role in furthering the aims of education,” (Eisner 1992, 594). Engagement with the arts helps to teach that:

(1) Not all problems have a single, correct answer… (2) The form of a thing is part of its content… (3) Having fixed objectives and pursuing clear-cut methods for achieving them are not always the most rational ways of dealing with the world… (4) In addition to their expressive function, the arts perform another function of critical importance…In the arts, students learn that some kinds of meaning may require the expressive forms that the arts make possible…but the arts also make discovery possible…[S]tudents can discover their potential to respond. The arts can help students find their individual capacity to feel and imagine. (Eisner 1992, 594–595)

As is the case with arts education, religious education also seeks to invite forms of knowledge and cognition appropriate to a world filled with complex, multifaceted problems requiring the ability to engage nuance and context. We educate people to trust and honor that which may be known religiously through participating in a sacred drumming circle, engaging in apophatic forms of prayer, or listening to a powerful musical performance, in the understanding that not everything that can be known manifests itself in language. Many of us teach within the context of religious traditions that hold dreams, visions, and felt connections with a spirit-world as valid sources of knowledge. We recognize the power of imagination and intuition, affect and emotion, esthetics and action, communitas and relationality, as diverse pathways for apprehending the Sacred that do not necessarily conform to the logic of rational quantification. And religious educators whose primary work involves teaching about religions/worldview also may find parallels with Eisner’s assertion that “the form of a thing is also part of its content,” when the study of practices of “religiously other” groups offers a window into the content of their religion and/or faith that cannot be understood apart from such practical inquiry.

I am grateful for the contributions to the field of religious education by Elliot Eisner and other educational theorists whose work, while not intentionally directed to our guild, supports efforts for educational meaning-making within religious education.

This first issue of Religious Education for the 2024 calendar year begins with Jared August’s experiment with orienting the educational work of Maria Montessori toward adult learners. Abdulaziz BinTaleb argues for incorporating religious literacy into Saudi secondary education, not as religious education per se but, rather, through a cultural studies approach that could help to foster tolerance and understanding of people of other faiths in the Saudi context. Russell W. Dalton continues the focus on children from our 2023 annual REA meeting with his article, “Engaging Childist Biblical Interpretation and Reading Studies to Enhance Children’s Bible Lessons.” Fides del Castillo and Rebecca Cacho report on their research with three hundred students in Catholic higher education in the Philippines in search of young people’s perspectives that can guide the future of religious education in such settings. Jonathan Mirvis’ research analyzes life story interviews of immigrant Jewish religious educators in Israel, in search of a better understanding of their entrepreneurial educational processes at work and how these approaches shift the larger landscape of Israeli religious education. A book review by Susan Willhauck concludes this January-February issue of our journal. I wish you much enjoyment, learning, and a happy new year as you read!

Joyce Ann Mercer, Editor
New Haven, CT, USA
[email protected]