International Journal of Education Through Art - Current Issue

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.

‘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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Review of: Art Education for a Sustainable Planet: Embracing Ecopedagogy in K-12 Classrooms, Joy Bertling (2023)

New York: Teachers College Press, 208 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-80776-770-2, p/bk, $38.95

ISBN 978-0-80776-771-9, h/bk, $117.00

ISBN 978-0-80778-140-1, e-book, $38.95

Review of: Imagining un-war through Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Arc de Triomphe