Dr. Gerstenblatt is completing her ninth year of service at the University of Southern Maine. Dr. Gerstenblatt teaches in the areas of community practice, research, policy, diversity, and the electives Community Art Practice, Animal-Human Bond in Social Work Practice, and Storytelling in Social Work Practice. She utilizes critical service learning pedagogy and the Learning Record, a system for gathering, organizing, analyzing, evaluating, and reporting evidence of student progress and achievement, which focuses on growth and development vs. performance. Dr. Gerstenblatt incorporates innovative methods in her teaching including mapping, collage, annotated playlists, multimodal storytelling, and creative fiction and nonfiction. She has taken students abroad to Iceland and Greenland as part of study abroad courses and research projects.

Dr. Gerstenblatt’s research is situated at the intersection of teaching and service, centered on the principles of participatory and applied research that centralizes the voices of those often overlooked. Her research areas are service learning and community-university partnerships, well-being of child care providers, arts-based methods, animal-human bond, and the experiences of residents and students working on community art projects. While her topics are broad, they are united by a common aim of representing diverse lived experiences in their complexity using qualitative and arts-based methods. Dr. Gerstenblatt’s recent work on collage portraiture as a representation of complex narratives and its utility in research, pedagogy and community practice earned her USM’s prestigious Trustee Professorship for 2021-22.

Dr. Gerstenblatt is currently working with an interdisciplinary team investigating the lived experiences of people in coastal communities and the environmental, cultural, social, and political changes in Greenland and Maine. Dr. Gerstenblatt is a mentor to her students, including them in research projects and publishing. She is a successful grant writer and obtained external and internal funding for research funding to support her collaborative and solo projects, most recently for travel to Greenland with a team of five faculty and five students. Dr. Gerstenblatt is also an established artist, integrating her art into scholarship, pedagogy and community work. In September of 2022 Dr. Gerstenblatt exhibited 17 collage portraits at the Jewish Museum of Portland Maine and The Maine Center for Holocaust and Human Rights, which were part of her Trustee Professorship Award.