An Ethics of Care in Art Education

I begin this editorial with acknowledgments. As I settle into my role as senior editor of Studies in Art Education, I wish to thank the previous three senior editors of Studies for the mentoring they have provided me: B. Stephen Carpenter II (2017–2019), Dónal O’Donoghue (2019–2021), and Robert Sweeny (2021–2023). There is an ethics of care that permeates their behavior and the shared legacy of this journal. Steve was the senior editor when I became a Studies reviewer. As a new reviewer for Studies, I was most impressed with his keen intellect, his gentle mentoring, and his ability to synthesize reviewer comments for authors. Dónal was an example in his demonstration of deep appreciation for the efforts of others, his vast knowledge of literature when supporting authors’ ideas, and his genuine constant support and tutelage when I worked with him as commentary editor. And Bob, for his kindness, ease, fairness, decisiveness, and efficiency. The actions of all three reflect their united perspective that the senior editor responsibility merits great seriousness. The ways they executed their role seemed a diligent labor of love for the art education field. I felt inspired by their ethics of care (Noddings, 2013).

The same is true of the current editorial team at Studies. Mira Kallio-Tavin, our associate editor, provides another example of serious commitment to supporting the journal and art education scholarship. She was a reviewer on the editorial review board for 8 years prior to being elected associate editor. Such a commitment over extended time demonstrates true caring. Amy Barnickel, Studies assistant editor, has also made a long-term commitment to Studies. Amy extends her consistent work ethic, wisdom, skills, organizational excellence, and warmth to the editorial team mentoring each new senior editor. I also want to thank Media Review Editor David Herman Jr., and Commentary Editor Tyson E. Lewis. Their clarity of perspective, insights, and perseverance are clearly evident. Additionally, the foundation of this journal is the editorial review board. The reviewers’ keen perceptions, exactitude, and research expertise deeply provoke authors’ perspectives enabling growth in agency, ideas, and writing. The reviewers work throughout the 12-month year to provide comprehensive detailed feedback for each submission. It has been a great honor to work with this editorial review board, and I look forward to our future work. Thank you.

And thank you to NAEA’s Publications Manager, Jamie Klinger-Krebs, and to NAEA’s Copyediting & Content Coordinator, Katherine Holland. Thank you to NAEA and Taylor & Francis for their support in all aspects of the journal.

An Ethics of Care

I began this editorial with extended acknowledgments because I feel it is often customary in academia not to stop to thank people, or each other, for all that we do. The hierarchies that toxify our academic existences are somewhat taken for granted, becoming tacit ways through which we are educated to function. They then become explicit customs for mentoring in higher education. It is important to examine and attempt to transform our institutions and the ways they shape conformities that reify distance, patriarchy, and White-dominant ideologies rooted in colonial enterprise. Therefore, I would like to focus my first editorial for Studies on a possible alternative to a distanced paradigm, what the late bell hooks in All About Love: New Visions (2001) refers to as a “love ethic” (p. xix). By this, she means “to begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumes accountability and responsibility” (p. 13). Here, connected to the research practices that form the basis of the authors’ writings in this issue, I rely on hooks again:

When I travel around the nation giving lectures about ending racism and sexism, audiences, especially young listeners, become agitated when I speak about the place of love in any movement for social justice. Indeed, all the great movements for social justice in our society have strongly emphasized a love ethic. (2001, pp. xviii–xix)

The authors in this issue reveal hooks’s concept of a living “love ethic” (2001, p. xix) as they urge accountability and responsibility from art education researchers, scholars, and pedagogues in their search for social change and radical transformation. The articles embody decolonial thinking, revisionist histories, exploring aesthetics of the arts as White property (Gaztambide-Fernández et al., 2018), transformative intervention in pedagogical online frameworks eliciting both belonging and a social constructivist approach, and an examination of the importance of confronting war and engaging social justice in art education. And as I dialogue with the authors’ writings about their research here, I also refer to Shawn Wilson’s Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods (2008), as it has deeply contributed to reshaping my views and understandings about research. He defines a research paradigm as a set of underlying beliefs that guide our actions as researchers. In setting out as senior editor of Studies, I ask myself, What research paradigms do we rely on most in art education? Are our research practices changing? What are the purposes of our research processes and practices? What can our research purposes become in art education? Are our research practices based on an ethics of care? Of course, there may be few material answers to such questions, but in the next 2 years, I hope to explore some of our research and teaching practices from such vantage points.

A Bit of My Story

I have found that our notions of research in the academy are often positioned in a clinical language of separateness and a hegemonic philosophy that claims objectivity. But, thankfully, as a student in graduate school, my mentor Graeme Sullivan shared the book Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (2021) by Maori ethnographer Linda Tuhiwai Smith. I was preparing to work with Guatemalan Maya Indigenous artists/mentors/teachers who were to guide our painting lessons with me as their student. Tuhiwai Smith’s (2021) text changed my ideas about research as a non-Indigenous person working with Indigenous communities. She made very clear the harmful historical research trajectory perpetrated on Indigenous communities worldwide rooted in deception, dehumanization, and misrepresentation (Tuhiwai Smith, 2021). I used her text as a guide for my own lifelong artistic study as a researcher, which has now spanned more than 20 years.

One event that has provided me with additional significant experience at a scholarly gathering is my participation in the Indigenous Inquiry Circle (IIC), a special interest group of the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI), founded by the late Norman Denzin at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2005–present). The IIC comprises Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers and scholars and was formed in 2011 as a response to a felt need to acknowledge Indigenous perspectives more fully at the ICQI. Its initiative was to honor the deceased Native American ancestors removed or exterminated from the land now called Illinois and to properly host the ICQI as custodians of the land. Each year since 2011, during a preconference day prior to the convening of the ICQI, an annual Pipe Ceremony, Opening Circle, and Welcome Song on the Quad Green are held with emerging Elder Joseph Naytowhow. This honors the removed or deceased Native peoples of Illinois: the Kaskaskias, Cahokias, Tamaroas, Peorias, Metchigamis, Miami, Winnebago, Fox, Sacs (Sauk), Kickapoo, and Pottawatomie tribes and their ancestors, upon whose land the Congress takes place. My participation for more than a decade as a non-Indigenous person and ally has helped me experience specific, unspoken expectations of an ethics of care.

Life Lessons: Acknowledgment and Care

Through both the IIC and my painting lessons with Guatemalan Maya mentors Pedro Rafael González Chavajay and Paula Nicho Cúmez (2000–present), I have learned many life lessons about the act of acknowledgment. Before the IIC, I was aware that the lessons with my Maya painting mentors would be grounded in relationship and reciprocity, and they would be lifelong. Therefore, from the outset, an ethics of care was guided by Tuhiwai Smith’s (2021) instructions, which unequivocally directed me and our work. Further, what Indigenous participants in the IIC taught me as a non-Indigenous ally was that the positions of locating myself, my past, my parents, my place, and my mentors’ places were essential for trust. This meant that any time I presented the research, I needed to locate my positionality as a measure of respect and acknowledgment. I needed to clearly demonstrate a respectful relationship with my mentors. It was essential that I not only demonstrated what I received, but moreover, what I gave in return. From Indigenous perspectives, the evidence of a dynamic friendship, care, mutual respect was considered an inherent part of the credibility of the research. Issues of honoring and establishing trust became the necessary protocols that guided the work (Eldridge, 2008).

Additionally, whenever we held dialogues at the IIC, all participants sat in a talking circle, which meant every voice counted. Wilson (2008) notes,

A talking circle involves people sitting in a circle, where each person has the opportunity to take an uninterrupted turn in discussing the topic. Talking circles, while not a new idea for Indigenous people, are newly being accepted as a research technique (Hanohano, 2001; Martin, 2001). They are based upon the ideal of respect for participants in the circle (Archibald and Haig-Brown, 1996), where everyone has an equal chance to speak and be heard. Discussion typically follows a controlled format where each participant has an opportunity to talk in turn about the topic brought to the circle. (p. 41)

The talking circle can be further described in this way: “Typically, group members sit in a circle that represents… the equality of all members. [Each speaker] ‘speaks from the heart’ and the group listens silently and non-judgmentally until the speaker has finished” (Wilson & Wilson, 2000, as cited in Wilson, 2008, p. 41). This was new for me as a non-Indigenous person (and scholar).

At the IIC, in our talking circle, everyone was given a turn to speak; every voice counted; each person’s words and feelings were to be taken equally seriously. We formed panels to discuss more humanistic ways of peer review for manuscript submissions, collaborative approaches to writing research, and more humanistic practices in the tenure and promotion process. These discussions were significant because I realized I was not alone in my discomfort with procedures in the academy, their inherent isolation and competition. There were other possibilities for research frameworks, relationships with colleagues that fostered honoring, reciprocity, relationship, acknowledgment of positionality, sustained engagement, and respectful protocols. Fostering such qualities became part of our work in the IIC, which is now in its 13th year. Notably, before and after each ICQI, when the IIC meets and we share our perspectives, I never fail to feel uplifted and spiritually alive at an academic conference. It is thus with this spirit of honoring and a continued ethics of care that I wish to start my own sojourn with this issue of Studies in Art Education.

Honoring Through Multivocal Speaking and Listening

With such thoughts in mind, I have offered a change in the formatting of the journal to celebrate multiple voices with the hope of creating a multivocal forum, not unlike a talking circle, in which our working processes might create a space for sharing and honoring the equality among participants. Therefore, the commentary and media review editors will share their perspectives with Studies readers in this issue. Tyson E. Lewis, commentary editor, offers readers an editorial, “Commentary on Commentaries,” in which he expresses his vision for the commentaries section of the journal. Likewise, David Herman Jr., media review editor, introduces his vision for the media review section with his essay, “Stepping Into a Legacy: Charting the Course as Media Review Editor for Studies in Art Education.” In the future, the intent will also be to hold dialogues highlighting the voices of others in editorials as we go. I will attempt to introduce multiple perspectives as a form of respectful collaboration.

The Articles in This Issue as a Collective

In the introduction of Research Is Ceremony, Wilson (2008) states that relationality requires the reader to know more about him as author, along with his personal motivations for conducting the research. One of his goals is to create a relationship with the reader so the reader’s understanding becomes part of the work itself. In this way, Wilson encourages the reader to enter the world of research.

Likewise, the following articles provide relational pathways of entry for each reader. Authors position themselves within the research writing to express what matters most to them as researchers for philosophical, pedagogical, and social change. The manuscripts use research as a means to foster awareness. Although the variety of content is evident, at its core, each article or essay seeks change through action based on hooks’s definition of a “love ethic” (2001, p. xix). Thinking along with Wilson (2008) in the second half of this editorial, I will present excerpts from each article in each author’s voice in a potentially new circular format—like a call-and-response grounded in mentoring and relationships across time. But first I will attempt to hold a brief dialogue with each author.

A Love Ethic Necessitates Action

As a collective, the authors in this issue create research seeking change and transformation of our social world, and in turn, in art education curriculum and pedagogy. The first three authors call attention to the need for a historical and contemporary honoring of human rights. After reading All About Love (hooks, 2001), I thought of the ways the authors in this issue of Studies courageously used their research to advocate for justice. They do so from a place of deep and genuine care, rooted in antiracist practices. The authors envision education as a practice of freedom, as hooks had. Bae-Dimitriadis, Johnson, and Denmead apply decolonizing frameworks as a call to action.

Michelle Bae-Dimitriadis urges that as part of our place-based research and pedagogical practices in art education, we make clearly visible the fact of Indigenous sovereignty across the Americas. She brings to light Tuck and Yang’s (2012) distinction between decolonization as metaphor and decolonizing action. Bae-Dimitriadis’s focus on the difference between a metaphorical stance, which is symbolic, and embodied intervening action, is critically important. Her research and teaching center ethical action critiquing settler colonial perspectives that have not acknowledged Native presence in art education pedagogies (Ballengee-Morris, 2010). The arts-based land inquiry that Bae-Dimitriadis enacts with her preservice students provokes an active witnessing of settler colonial monuments and plaques and artistically intervenes to draw attention to stolen land. Such acts constitute art practice as research transforming student knowledges and perspectives (Sullivan, 2010). The cover photo of the journal depicts one of Bae-Dimitriadis’s student’s visual arts–based decolonial intervention.

Like Bae-Dimitriadis, Nicole P. Johnson asks the reader to engage in decolonial thinking and practice to contemplate and critique neocolonial art education curriculum in Jamaica, which she observes from both emic and etic perspectives. The use of autoethnography underlines Johnson’s own experience and locates it at the center of her larger research questions. From my perspective, locating oneself within the work is honest because it asks that we question our givens and assumptions as we go. This action indicates an ethics of care in research. Johnson also applies a revitalized and decolonizing historical perspective (Bolin & Kantawala, 2017) to analyze colonial art education histories in Jamaica. Her examination questions neocolonial imposition and its interference with lived cultural and personal experiences of Jamaican students and art teachers. Johnson’s call for the development of a critical consciousness (Darder, 2015; Freire, 2018; Mignolo, 2021) is threaded throughout her writing.

Tyler Denmead has written a piece that promises to amplify ideas that surround the arts as White property (Gaztambide-Fernandez et al., 2018). Denmead proposes that the process of aestheticizing grounded in a White dominant ideology ranks the human through the aesthetic process. In the way that Bae-Dimitriadis confronts place-based art education with its attachment to settler colonial perspectives that deny Indigenous presence on the land, Denmead questions the visual culture art education movement, which he observes was concerned “with the political ontology of the image rather than the human.” Denmead suggests art educators reckon with a visual arts history that functions as a dehumanizing racemaking technology. As a counternarrative, Denmead introduces the artist Al-An deSouza, whom he positions as working toward a “negotiated refusal” of the arts as White property.

Bae-Dimitriadis’s, Johnson’s, and Denmead’s work comprehensively exemplify hooks’s love ethic (2001, p. xix). The authors inspire antiracist, decolonizing pathways that work toward justice in art education and the broader field. Likewise, the next two articles are focused on transformed art educational practices and classroom interactive spaces to invoke belonging. The research, teaching, and writing address transparency, personal narrative, sharing, empowerment, and interactivity that embed relationality in virtual settings. During and after COVID, many submissions to Studies have necessarily focused on virtual learning and its potentialities, as well as digital shifts in approaches to visual arts curriculum and pedagogy as necessities.

Based on a series of transnational visual arts workshops that comprise their case study, Ahran Koo, Kyungeun Lim, and Borim Song share their autobiographical narratives as art education professors as part of the research process with preservice art education students. Each opens their life to students as a means of cultivating an empathic response on the part of students. The authors describe their life-changing experiences as Asian American art educators in the United States, revealing both hardships and successes. These recorded narratives present vulnerabilities and strengths to enlighten students to anti-Asian racial microaggressions the professors experienced in multiple contexts. Such courageous action and transparency on the part of their professors elicit students’ sharing of their own cultural and personal stories via dialogues and collaborative artmaking. The authors make clear that this antiracist work cultivates a sense of belonging when it is most needed.

Katrina Cutcliffe, Beata Batorowicz, Rhiannan Johnson, Kate Cantrell, and Tanya McLean introduce a “socially distant social constructivist” approach to teaching online. Their mixed-methods research focuses on the impact of idea generation, questioning, decentralized curriculum, and specific digital tools, which catalyze collaboration, interaction, connection, belonging, and mutual care. The case study research uses an asynchronous online model to support meaning-making in the visual arts. Multidirectional feedback processes between teachers and students, iterative peer-to-peer connective feedback, and a collective hybrid studio space enhance interaction and co-responsiveness. Researchers found that their relational approach allowed for social constructivist pedagogy to be transitioned online successfully. Pursuing hooks’s concept of a “love ethic” (2001, p. xix), the online studies described consciously produce inclusive spaces for student interaction, empathy, connection, care, and self-questioning.

Olga Ivashkevich’s poignant commentary, “Questions for Art Education in the Time of War,” proposes relevant questions art teachers can ask their students to awaken them to their identities as global citizens. Ivashkevich provokes us to think about why we avoid issues of war in art education. Additionally, she locates her own life in this work and questions why it takes cultural closeness to feel empathy. The author reflects on distance, discriminatory hierarchies, and the manipulation of the media as factors that contribute to anesthetized dehumanized responses in the United States. Ivashkevich addresses active witnessing as a catalyst for empathic civic action.

This issue closes with Marie Huard’s media review of Teaching and Assessing Social Justice Art Education: Power, Politics, and Possibilities (Keifer-Boyd et al., 2023). Here I will leave the readers with Media Review Editor David Herman Jr.’s insights. He points out Huard underscores “a rich narrative of diverse voices, experiences, and critical examinations that push the boundaries of traditional thought and actions.” Herman continues, “It is these voices, diverse in their experiences and insights, that make Studies in Art Education a treasure trove of knowledge, insight, and praxis.”

Herman’s description of Studies circles back to Wilson’s (2008) perspectives on relationality: that what we do as researchers and pedagogues needs to embody the importance of relationship and honoring born out of diverse social justice perspectives. In other words, research and teaching practices can indeed illuminate decolonial thinking, action, and the pursuit of justice and equity, which underscore the importance of all lives. At the beginning of this editorial, I proposed acknowledgment and care as part of a paradigm that I believe all the writings in this issue pursue. The authors motivate readers to see in new ways and to understand what an ethics of care—or a “love ethic” as hooks (2001, p. xix) defines it—might truly mean for art education. As a collective, these authors are redefining relational research in art education, leading us as artists, researchers, teachers, scholars, and readers to more clearly felt and defined levels of emancipatory art education pedagogies.

The following concentric diagram is used to propose thoughtful scholars’ writings grounded in an ethics of care that speak to each other directly in a circle of call-and-response. Hopefully this conversation will also cultivate a dynamic and direct relational dialogue among authors and readers. In his editorial in this issue, Tyson E. Lewis shaped new thoughts for me about the possibilities of commentaries as form. Lewis observes, “Commentaries propose a unique opportunity for the journal to engage in spatial experimentation.” The formation presented below engages a circle of voices, without hierarchy, through which thoughtful perspectives travel together in and out of art education, highlighting dialogues that honor all voices equally.