Vol. 21 No. 1 (2025): Conflict, Environmental Disaster and their Aftermath: Repairing Our Broken World through Art

Issue URL:  https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/eta/21/1

Editorial

 Conflict, environmental disaster and their aftermath: Repairing our broken world through art

 Alice Wexler

Guest Editor, Professor Emerita, SUNY New Paltz

 Marjorie Manifold

Guest Editor, Indiana University

 

Our goal for this Special Issue is to examine if and how the arts can mitigate human and environmental suffering in times of human conflict, climate catastro­phe and global pandemics. We asked if the arts have the capacity to awaken empa­thetic responses to inseparable, intersecting issues and if they can help to redress these traumas. If so, how can one person – one art educator – take concrete steps to contribute meaningfully towards this goal? How might art educators engage in everyday activism by using the arts to examine underlying systemic power struc­tures in all levels of education and might the arts resist such structures that limit the individual’s intuition, well-being and self-realization? Therefore, we suggest that the ethical issues of the arts are to inquire how the arts might help to establish equity among diverse peoples, First Peoples and the more-than-human world.

 

 

Articles

Making art at the end of the world: (Un)learning in the Schoolhouse of Modernity

 Carrie Karsgaard
Cape Breton University

Cala Coats
Arizona State University

Marina Basu
Arizona State University

 Ann Nielsen
National Institute for Excellence in Teaching

Adriene Jenik
Arizona State University

 Iveta Silova
Arizona State University

‘Making art at the end of the world’ introduces a research-creation project with participants from across the world as one step towards collectively reimagining mainstream education’s role in responding to the planetary climate crisis. The article starts with the assumption that the dominant form of education is deeply implicated in the climate crisis and needs to be unlearned and re-learned for the planet and people to survive and thrive. Drawing on the concept of ‘The House of Modernity’ to identify the historic values, beliefs and practices that have propelled our global climate crisis, we focus specifically on what we conceptualize as the ‘Schoolhouse of Modernity’, the place where colonial-modernity is transmitted and reproduced through educational content, pedagogy and structure, including through the arts. Working with artistic responses, crowd-sourced through the ‘Turn It Around!’ (TiA) project, we explore the power of arts as a methodology for critically interrogating education in the Schoolhouse of Modernity, tracing how TiA’s project design and process offer possibilities for education otherwise. 

 

A wicked problem: The rising tide of pollution at Ilavalai Beach, Sri Lanka

 Ann Holt
Pennsylvania State University

 Cindy Maguire
Adelphi University

This article describes practice-led research focused on a teaching project in Ilavalai, Sri Lanka that involves socially engaged art (SEA) and science, tech­nology, engineering, art and math (STEAM) workshops centred around a local community challenge, or, ‘a wicked problem’, in this case, the community issue of ocean and beach pollution. The project explores questions around how art can be a vehicle for hope, resilience, rebuilding lives and community towards vision­ing, building, recovering futures as a cultural capacity. Theoretical underpinnings guiding the research and teaching in the context of place are connected to future-making through artful coalitions that decentre definitions of (D)development and (C)culture. The article details the workshop processes including images and videos of student work and concludes with a reflection on how using SEA and STEAM in a development context, side-by-side with partners, can support and empower communities in aspiring to and imagining hopeful, healthy and mean­ingful futures.

  

Seeing beyond the sea: Arts-based research on cross-cultural journeys

 Sunah Kim
Hanyang University

 Koichi Kasahara
Tokyo Gakugei University

This study focuses on how two researchers, one Japanese and one Korean, remem­ber, resist and reconstruct the memories of others by employing a cross-cultural approach. The purpose of this study is to examine the intricate interplay of indi­vidual cultural experiences and collective memories, grounded in postcolonial theory. The research questions guiding this journey are twofold. How do cross-cultural dialogues take shape through a cultural journey guided by direct engage­ment with historical sites? How does intersubjective understanding emerge between two individuals with different colonizing/colonized experiences as they revisit international conflicts? These questions were explored through arts-based research that involved journeys to walk each other’s lands and see the sea. The results of this study exemplify the process of reconstructing and visualizing cross-cultural understanding and can be summarized as follows: surfacing one’s own perspectives; walking into history; and creating resonant spaces through aesthetic consciousness. This outcome offers implications for utilizing art in cross-cultural learning to foster an awareness of differences.

 

Artefacts of inequity in art education: Critically tracing what disaster reveals

Sarah Travis
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

At the start of the author’s second year as an art educator in New Orleans public schools in August 2005, the city was devastated by the cataclysmic destruction of Hurricane Katrina. Almost twenty years later, new disasters have come and gone, adding more layers to a culture that has always held both deep pain and ardent joy, a place that is persistently haunted by not only environmental precarity but also years of racial, economic and educational injustice, yet remaining one of the most culturally dynamic and artistically active places in the United States. Drawing upon Jane Bennett’s framework of vital materiality, and Amelia Kraehe’s frame­work of arts equity within a methodology of research-creation as delineated by Natalie Loveless, Erin Manning and Sarah Truman, the author utilizes personal artefacts as catalysts for critically tracing what disaster reveals about inequity in art education. This inquiry invites other art educators to engage in critical reflec­tion on what their own identity artefacts reveal and conceal about equity and justice within art education.

  

Visual Essay

 Tornado diary: Material vulnerability and art education

Emily Jean Hood
University of Arkansas at Little Rock

In March 2023 in Little Rock, Arkansas, my family’s home was destroyed by a tornado. Around that same time in North America, natural disasters seemed common: catastrophic flooding in Vermont, tornadoes throughout the South and Midwest, expansive wildfires in Canada. Environmental disaster has become part of the global human experience. In this visual essay, I revisit the shattering of my own illusions of material stability through prose and photographic images that were produced around the time of the tornado by myself and my children. The prose is written from a second-person perspective, inspired by Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s (2015) essay ‘Now let us shift… conocimiento… inner work, public acts’, to invite the reader into a sense of shared vulnerability. I make connections between these forms of artmaking and concepts of ontological, systemic and material vulnerabil­ity. I attempt to show that all material bodies have a shared vulnerability and encourage art educators to embrace this vulnerability within artmaking practices.

 

Article

Envisioning climate futures: Applying CreativeVoice as a research method in community art workshops

 Carissa DiCindio
University of Arizona

Jenna S. Green
University of Arizona

 Jonathon Keats
University of Arizona

This article examines how artist activations can involve communities in discus­sions of climate futures by empowering people to envision new, future-oriented avenues for change and connect these concepts to their own lived experiences. In this study, we used CreativeVoice, a research methodology that engages partici­pants in the creation of knowledge, asking them to document and share their expe­riences through artmaking. Study participants engaged with Jonathon Keats’s art through community workshops focused on local ecology in Tucson, Arizona. Participants were then invited to continue creating art to connect these themes to their daily lives. They shared their art and experiences with each other in focus groups and with their communities through an art exhibition. We share successes, challenges and future directions of this work in engaging community art and ecological futures.

 

Visual Essay

Divining through artmaking to create a mended world

Ramya Ravisankar
Columbus College of Art & Design

This visual essay is an artmaking-research-based inquiry that considers how we can mend our world by addressing the hybridity and malleability of notions like identity, home, materiality and future(s). This work explores how artists and art educators can contribute to the imagination and futurism(s) that valorize and repair our environment. It also acknowledges the role of the more-than-human world as collaborators in this world-making process. This inquiry is a form of artistic divination to interrogate the artist–researcher’s Indian American iden­tity. Through photographs and found imagery from South India and the United States, such as saris, knitted artwork and scans of dried plant material, I envision future(s) through artmaking and research. Drawing on notions of pluriversality and decoloniality, this visual essay explores the world-making potentialities of this artmaking and research practice. Personal reflections through artmaking and writing promote environmentally aware practices of making, thinking and world-making, offering a vision of a mended world.

  

Article

A content analysis of K-12 visual arts standards: Investigating ecological integration

Joy G. Bertling 
The University of Tennessee

Susan M. Gagliardi
Independent Scholar

Kristin Leah Rabalais
The University of Tennessee

In lieu of the undeniable ecological emergencies facing the planet and the need for ecologically oriented art pedagogies, which have been well argued and recurringly championed in the field, the degree to which and manner in which visual arts standards might support such approaches is important to assess. In this article, we present a content analysis of US kindergarten through Grade 12 national and state visual arts standards. We found ecological integration (EI) units were present but minimal across most standards. Despite our conclusion that widespread ecologi­cal re-imagining of US K-12 visual arts standards will be required, our analysis also demonstrates the potential of such integration. In multiple, though relatively infrequent, cases, visual arts standards demonstrated vital EI that should be acknowledged and celebrated. This content analysis provides exemplars for future standards revisions and identifies some key high-impact entry points for EI.

 

Visual Essay

Not a snow fort

Allison Rowe
University of Iowa

In art education, material limitations often lead to unexpected innovation by obliging makers and their teachers to grapple with the conditions of their envi­ronment through new and creative forms. This visual essay documents one such turn after an unseasonably warm winter necessitated the reconstitution of a snow sculpting curriculum for children from the Dovercourt Boys & Girls Club into a day of outdoor artmaking about the unstable conditions of the natural world. Included in their revised curriculum was an aesthetic scavenger hunt developed to attune young artists to natural materials. In response to this invitation, the children unexpectedly self-organized to create their own environmental, visual scavenger hunt. This visual essay records their teacher and collaborator’s uptake of their prompts to tell the story of the co-emergent learning possibilities that envi­ronmental artmaking can offer in times of instability and crisis.

  

Book Review

Art Education for a Sustainable Planet: Embracing Ecopedagogy in K-12 Classrooms, Joy Bertling (2023)
Reviewed by Albert Stabler, Illinois State University, USA

 

Art Review

Imagining Un-War through Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Arc De Triomphe
Reviewed by Jennifer Bergmark, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA