The Art of Empathy: A Mixed Methods Case Study of a Critical Place-Based Art Education Program.

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. IJEA Vol. 16 No. 13 http://www.ijea. org/v16n13/ 2 Introduction Bowers (2001) described how our ecological crisis is marked by metaphors of difference and separation. One prominent underlying metaphor is humankind as superior to and separate from the natural world. Such metaphors can lead to detachment from, neutrality toward, and domination of the land. New ecological knowledge and attitudes cannot be added onto these anthropocentric schemas. An ecological paradigm presents an alternative. Through the metaphor of a complex web of interacting systems, humans are positioned as interdependent with the natural world. By adopting an ecological paradigm, students have the opportunity to move past the harmful distinctions and definitions that have characterized our relations with the earth. They can embody a deep recognition of the interconnectedness of all living things. To fully embrace such a paradigm, students must not merely identify these connections: they must experience and feel them. Empathy, particularly with the environment, is deeply tied to such a paradigm. Empathy with the environment represents a sense of connectedness with the natural world. This connection often comes in the form of enjoyment of nature, empathy for creatures, sense of oneness, and sense of responsibility (Cheng & Monroe, 2012). Art education may be uniquely poised to help students cultivate this empathy with the environment as well as to help students develop ecological paradigms. First, art education has long held associations with empathy because of the relationship between aesthetic experience and empathy. During an aesthetic experience, empathy enables a dialogic, relational encounter between viewer and art object (White, 2009). Second, works of art can provide multiple ecological viewpoints. Third, art education has a tendency toward experiential engagement with the world that has the potential to change attitudes and behaviors. In recognizing this capacity of art education as well as in responding to calls within the discipline for social relevance, scholars have proposed various ecologically-responsive art pedagogies (Anderson & Guyas, 2012; Blandy & Fenn, 2012; Blandy & Hoffman, 1993; Gradle, 2007; Graff, 1990; Graham, 2007; Inwood, 2008; Lankford, 1997; Neperud, 1995). Despite this abundance of theory, research is needed to determine how students in ecologically-responsive art education programs experience ecological paradigms and empathy with the environment. To address this need, I operated as a teacher-researcher to study middle school students in a critical place-based art education program. The curriculum was place-based as it centered art education directly within place—in the local context and content. Fused with a critical education component, the curriculum encouraged students to engage critically and creatively with local social, ecological, economic, and political issues as they studied art. Throughout the program, I examined how middle school students demonstrated ecological paradigms and empathy with the environment. This study asked: Bertling: The Art of Empathy 3 1. How do middle school students demonstrate empathy with the environment throughout a critical place-based art education program? 2. How does participation in a critical place-based art education program affect students’ ecological paradigms (pro-environmental orientations)? 3. Which aspects of a critical place-based art education program, if any, contribute to students’ sense of empathy with the environment? Through these questions, I sought to understand students’ experiences and the impact of the program. This article presents an analysis of the students’ ecological paradigms and then examines how students demonstrated empathy with the environment. The Ecological Imagination Greene (1995) thoroughly outlined the power of the imagination within the social world. She described how the imagination has the power to break through familiar definitions and distinctions that divide, to facilitate empathy, to expand our consciousness, to envision alternative realities, and to begin the process of working toward a better world. Such an imagination is needed within an ecological context, where arbitrary boundaries between humans and living things need to be bridged and new ecological realities need to be constructed. 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. A critical place-based art education answers this call. Through a critical place-based curricular approach, art education becomes a means of awakening the ecological imagination—opening the world to new relationships, new possibilities, new critiques, and, most importantly, new acts. Empirical Literature While the literature on ecologically-responsive pedagogies within the field of art education is limited, the place-based education literature is more robust. Studies demonstrate that placebased programs can positively impact students’ environmental knowledge, awareness, and appreciation; sense of place; place attachment; academic achievement; achievement motivation; and critical thinking (Athman & Monroe, 2004; Azano, 2011; Buxton, 2010; Conaway, 2006; Ernst & Monroe, 2006; Howley, Howley, Camper, & Perko, 2011; Kuwahara, 2013; Lieberman, Hoody, & State Education and Environmental Roundtable, 1998; Powers, 2004; Santelman, Gosnell, & Meyers, 2011; Takano, Higgins, & McLaughlin, 2009). These programs have been effective in a variety of geographic locations and with a range of populations, regardless of race, achievement, or age. Among these programs, the Maple Ridge School Project in British Columbia is notable as it represents a combination of IJEA Vol. 16 No. 13 http://www.ijea. org/v16n13/ 4 place-based, ecological, and imaginative education (Blenkinsop, 2013; Derby et al., 2013). The program aims to provide students with opportunities to deepen relationships with the more-than-human world and to act as cultural agents of ecological change. Although many theorists have proposed for art education to respond to ecological concerns, most accounts of programs are anecdotal (Anderson, 2000; Birt, Krug, & Sheridan, 1997; Holmes, 2002; Keifer-Boyd, 2001). The one empirical study to examine an ecologicallyresponsive art education program with K-12 students was Creel’s (2005) participatory action research study. As an art teacher, Creel worked with upper elementary students with “at-risk tendencies” in an environmental art education program. She found that participation in the program helped students develop empathetic understandings and behaviors, pro-social skills, self-esteem, and confidence. However, research is needed to explore the effectiveness of such programs with other populations. Studies with middle school students in particular are needed since this age may represent a critical period for bonding to occur between students and the earth (Sobel, 1997). Sobel (1997) asserted that one important goal of environmental education should be to help students develop empathy with the natural world. This goal is important given the connection between empathy and more responsible environmental attitudes (Schultz, 2000) and proenvironmental orientations (Karlegger & Cervinka, 2009). Additionally, several studies (Berenguer, 2007, 2010) suggest that empathy with the environment can be encouraged and can have a strong ecological impact on participants. Therefore, empathy is worth aiming to cultivate in students. Methodology I approached this study through a pragmatic paradigm, an alternative paradigm that positions the research questions as central to determining data collection and analysis methods (Morgan, 2007). Through this paradigm, I embraced both quantitative and qualitative methods. Mixed methods were used for expansion purposes (Greene, 2007) to expand the primary phenomenon, students’ experiences of empathy with the environment, to include a secondary phenomenon, students’ ecological paradigms. I chose a case study design (Stake, 1995) to understand student experiences of empathy within the real-world context of a classroom. I strove to understand a single bounded system—a 7th grade introductory art class at a public middle school in the southeastern United States. Using one of my own classes as a teacher researcher provided me with a high level of accessibility. The class represented a typical case in its size of 20 students and in its inclusion of students from a range of socioeconomic levels and differing racial backgrounds within a traditional public middle school. Bertling: The Art of Empathy 5 Data Collection Methods This study, conducted January through May, was qualitative dominant. I