Joy Bertling | University of Tennessee Knoxville (original) (raw)

Papers by Joy Bertling

Proceedings of the 2023 AERA Annual Meeting

International Journal of Education Through Art, Sep 1, 2022

Proceedings of the 2020 AERA Annual Meeting

$Research paper thumbnail of Middle School Students\u27 Empathy with the Environment throughout a Critical Place-Based Art Program$

The ecological imagination calls for a new mode of education: education that embraces the arts as... more The ecological imagination calls for a new mode of education: education that embraces the arts as a way to conceive of new ecological perspectives, other ways of being in relation to the earth, better ecological alternatives, and new dialogues about our role in the world. Through a critical place-based art pedagogy, education can become a means of awakening the ecological imagination—opening the world to new possibilities, new critiques, and, most importantly, new acts. Empathy is especially appropriate to study as an outcome of a critical place-based art program because of its ability to facilitate connections and its close ties with aesthetic experience. Thus, the purpose of this ongoing mixed methods case study is to examine how middle school students in a critical place-based art program experience empathy with the environment. Operating in the pragmatic paradigm, the study asks the following questions: How do middle school students experience empathy with the environment throug...

Proceedings of the 2021 AERA Annual Meeting

Bowers (2001) described how our ecological crisis is marked by metaphors of difference and separa... more Bowers (2001) described how our ecological crisis is marked by metaphors of difference and separation. By adopting an ecological paradigm, students have the opportunity to move past harmful distinctions that have characterized relations with the earth. Instead, students can move to a deep recognition of the interconnectedness of living things. Empathy, particularly with the environment, is deeply tied to such a paradigm. To help students develop this paradigm, a critical place-based art curriculum designed and implemented in a middle school classroom. The curriculum was informed by the ecological imagination, a call for education that embraces the arts as a way to conceive of new ecological perspectives and dialogues. Drawing exercises, interviews, surveys, journals reviews, observations, and focus groups were used to investigate student experiences. Data revealed that students' ecological paradigms increased as a result of their participation. Throughout the program, students exhibited empathy with the environment as they cared for nature, developed awareness, and accepted responsibility.

Environmental Education Research, 2020

In recent years, scholars have increasingly recognized the value of the arts for furthering the a... more In recent years, scholars have increasingly recognized the value of the arts for furthering the aims of environmental education (EE). Likewise, art education scholars have noted the affinity between visual art and EE. Despite a long-standing environmentally oriented thread in art education literature, the extent to which United States K-12 art educators have embraced these pedagogies is unclear. We conducted survey research to examine how K-12 art educators in the US engage in environmental integration, including the extent, forms, importance of and preparedness for integration. While art educators’ overall levels of environmental integration were fair, their valuing of environmental art pedagogies was moderate, suggesting a need for additional resources and professional development. Given K-12 art teachers’ interest in environmental art pedagogies and acknowledged dearth of knowledge, we argue EE capacity-building efforts might target this field, aiming for comprehensive art teache...

New research is emerging in the field of neuroscience and cognitive psychology that has implicati... more New research is emerging in the field of neuroscience and cognitive psychology that has implications for how art educators can help students respond to artworks with deeper levels of empathy. Empathy is an active construction of another’s experience based upon one’s own subjective experiences, memories, culture, emotions, and neurological predispositions (Immordino-Yang, 2008). Today, many scholars (Koss, 2006; Rosenblatt, 2001) consider empathy to be an essential component of an aesthetic experience. An aesthetic experience with a work of art involves an individual’s meaningful, cognitive engagement (Costantino, 2005), where cognition encompasses both mind (conceptual thought) and body (sensory and emotional thought). As the mind and body are both engaged, aesthetic experience becomes both an empathetic experience as the viewer empathizes with the subject matter and/or formal elements of the work as well as an imaginative one as the viewer engages his or her imagination to empathiz...

FEEL YOUR MORTALITY OR THAT OF OTHERS? Affifi and Christie (2019) described how “diverse accompli... more FEEL YOUR MORTALITY OR THAT OF OTHERS? Affifi and Christie (2019) described how “diverse accomplices” (p. 1144) within capitalist societies work to shield us from experiencing and dwelling on mortality. Advances in cosmetology and medicine allow us to “hide” or “fix” evidence of the aging process. Aging relatives’ care is often relegated to health care professionals and nursing homes (Oaks & Bibeau, 1987). Collective rituals surrounding death, common to cultures around the world, are increasingly minimal or anesthetized in Western countries (Affifi & Christie, 2019). Euphemisms gloss over death: Someone “passed away” or “‘is at rest’” (Oaks & Bibeau, 1987, p. 420). We are more and more removed from our meals’ biological origins; multinational corporations often play the starring role in food production, processing, and preparation. Even visual cues of our foods’ animal or plant origins are frequently lost— visualize prepackaged chicken nuggets and smiley-face potato fritters. Moreov...

Visual Inquiry, 2021

Pre-service teachers new to a field placement need the opportunity to orient themselves in relati... more Pre-service teachers new to a field placement need the opportunity to orient themselves in relation to their larger teaching contexts and configure geographies that resonate with the lives of their students. Soja’s Thirdspace offers a lens through which teachers might explore place multi-dimensionally. Building upon a previous arts-based educational research study assessing the potential of arts-based inquiry for supporting pre-service teachers in exploring their teaching contexts, this study, through a second curricular iteration, focused explicitly on art pre-service teachers’ critical geographic analysis, in the form of Thirdspace. In mapping their school zones, pre-service teachers began to identify illusory impressions and conceptions of students, schools and communities and then began to deconstruct them. Such Thirdspace journeys offer space for pre-service teachers to hone their perceptions, to retrain their gazes to see their students’ physical and lived worlds in their comp...

Studies in Art Education, 2021

In the midst of future-oriented dialogues within the field, we turned our attention broadly towar... more In the midst of future-oriented dialogues within the field, we turned our attention broadly toward the multiplicity of educational approaches that might characterize U.S. K–12 art education today. Through large-scale descriptive survey research (N = 742), we explored K–12 art teachers’ emphasis on 10 common educational approaches: choice-based art education/teaching for artistic behavior (TAB); community-based education; discipline-based art education (DBAE); design education; ecological/environmental education; interdisciplinary education or arts integration; multicultural education; social justice; science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)/science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics (STEAM); and visual/material culture. The results confirm we are in a period of plurality, albeit more defined by visual/material culture and multicultural education. The range of ways in which these 10 educational approaches can exhibit theoretically and in practice raises a number of critical questions. We recommend any future sketches of the field explore these nuances—delving deeper into how each of these curricular movements is conceptualized and enacted in K–12 art education practice.

Art Education, 2020

Encompassing complex scatter plots, visually friendly infographics, and surprising works of conte... more Encompassing complex scatter plots, visually friendly infographics, and surprising works of contemporary art, data visualizations are as diverse as the disciplines from which they emerge. Th ey can vary widely in complexity as well as purpose. Steele and Iliinsky (2011) described how visualizations might be created for informative purposes, to educate the audience; persuasive purposes, to advocate for a particular stance or course of action; or aesthetic purposes, to appreciate data in a new form. Within the context of mathematics and science, data visualizations oft en manifest as straightforward, traditional graphics, such as charts, graphs, or maps. Th ese graphics represent data in a more consumable form as they communicate complex information, oft en from large data sets, quickly and accurately (Steele & Iliinsky, 2011). In contrast, data visualizations within the realm of contemporary art move beyond conventional graphical displays to function as artistic modes of expression. Some artists create visualizations for appreciative purposes, translating or transforming data to explore their aesthetic potential, perhaps more so than their communicative power. In such cases, the need for the audience to decode the data is not a primary concern (Steele & Iliinsky, 2011). For example, William Anastasi’s (2012) subway drawings, where he loosely held a pencil to a paper during his commutes, reveal some data regarding the amount of jostling he encountered on a particular subway route. However, these works are more likely to be valued for their aesthetic appeal, or beauty, and divergent artistic process than for any transportation data they might reveal. More commonly, artists employ creative strategies, such as visual metaphor (Taylor, 2017), to contextualize content, facilitate audience interpretations, and provoke nuanced readings of the data. For instance, Laurie Frick (2010) color-coded wooden blocks to correspond with the severity of 264 amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) patients’ symptoms. In this installation, Eco-Visualizations: Facilitating Ecological Relationships —— AND —— Raising Environmental Awareness

Studies in Art Education, 2020

In the midst of the profound geological and ecological change of the Anthropocene, scholars in th... more In the midst of the profound geological and ecological change of the Anthropocene, scholars in the field of art education have proposed modes of art education responsive to ecological concerns. This study examined how art teacher education programs in the United States prepare art teachers to engage with ecological issues and implement ecological pedagogies. It utilized a descriptive survey design that involved large-scale surveys of art teacher education faculty and preservice art teachers. These data provide opportunities to acknowledge the general state of art teacher education while also recognizing what is pedagogically possible. We conclude that while the discipline has demonstrated growth in ecological integration, it could go much further in orienting itself ecologically. We expect this research to contribute to debates on the role of art education in responding to global concerns and the discipline’s ability to evolve in the midst of sweeping change.

The Rural Educator, 2019

This longitudinal case study explored one rural elementary art teacher’s praxis for two years aft... more This longitudinal case study explored one rural elementary art teacher’s praxis for two years after she participated in professional development sessions on place-based education (PBE). These sessions focused specifically on PBE within the discipline of art for K-12 art educators in a geographically-large southeastern school district. Through surveys, observations, interviews, and document analysis of curricular materials, the researchers investigated the teacher’s experiences with PBE as she taught art in a rural area of the district. Her curricular decisions transitioned from a focus on art reflecting her personal knowledge base to art that built on students’ expressions of, experiences in, and knowledge of, their rural setting. Implications for teacher professional development focused on rural education include strategies for promoting the contextualization of content and communicating the benefits of transitioning from place-neutral to place-based instruction.

Marilyn Zurmuehlen Working Papers in Art Education, 2012

Educational Action Research, 2019

ABSTRACT As practitioner inquiry is now established as a widely-recognized research tradition and... more ABSTRACT As practitioner inquiry is now established as a widely-recognized research tradition and flourishing movement for educational change, we might consider ways that practitioner inquiry could be conceptualized and executed to broaden implementation, deepen understanding, and sustain inquiry within teacher education. Arts-based research may be an ideal methodology for the extension and sustainment of such inquiry as its visual, performative orientation lends itself to participant engagement and provides access in the representation and dissemination of results. This article will put forth models for advancing arts-based practitioner inquiry within the field of teacher education, by drawing from multiple cycles of a dual-layered, ABER study. This vision of arts-based practitioner inquiry is that of inclusion, increasing the number of those who conduct and interact with research; collaboration, blurring boundaries between the inquiries of teacher educators and pre-service teachers; accessibility, tapping into the power of the arts to engage and communicate in ways that scientific language cannot; and continued engagement, using learning from one cycle to inform inquiry in the next.