Young Children, Pedagogy and the Arts

Ways of Seeing

Felicity McArdle, Gail Boldt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136215803
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Young Children, Pedagogy and the Arts is an innovative text that describes practices and research that cross all five strands of the arts—visual, drama, music, dance, and media—and illuminates ways of understanding children and their arts practices that go beyond the common traditions. The book:

- Offers practical and rich illustrations of teachers' and children's work based on international research that integrates theory with practice;

- Brings a critical lens to arts education;

- Includes summaries, reflective questions, and recommended further readings with every chapter.

Young Children, Pedagogy and the Arts provides a more nuanced understanding of the arts through an exploration of specific instances in which committed teachers and researchers are discovering what contemporary multimodal tools offer to young children. Chapters contain examples of 'doing' the arts in the early years, new ways of teaching, and how to use emerging technologies to develop multiliteracies, equity, agency, social and cultural capital, and enhance the learning and engagement of marginalized children.

Part I

Ways of Seeing—The Arts

2

Small Acts of Resistance

The Role of Intergenerational Collaborative Drawing in Early Childhood Teaching and Learning

Linda Knight

This chapter focuses on ‘intergenerational collaborative drawing’, a particular process of drawing whereby adults and children draw at the same time on a blank paper space. Such drawings can be produced for a range of purposes, and based on different curriculum or stimulus subjects. Children of all ages, and with a range of physical and intellectual abilities, are able to draw with parents, carers and teachers. Intergenerational collaborative drawing is a highly potent method for drawing in early childhood contexts because it brings adults and children together in the process of thinking and theorizing in order to create visual imagery and this exposes in deep ways, to adults and children, the ideas and concepts being learned about. For adults, this exposure to a child’s thinking is a far more effective assessment tool than when they are presented with a finished drawing they know little about.

This chapter focuses on drawings to examine wider issues of learning independence and how in drawing, preferred schema in the form of hand-out worksheets, the suggestive drawings provided by adults, and visual material seen in everyday life all serve to co-opt a young child into making particular schematic choices. I suggest that intergenerational collaborative drawing therefore serves to work as a small act of resistance to that of co-opting, in that it helps adults and children to collectively challenge popular creativity and learning discourses.

What Drawings Can Perform

The three- and four-year-old children sit and wait to begin drawing. The teacher recalls an environmental story they had read earlier. She asks the children about components of the story via recall questions, which they answer. They then begin their collaborative drawing. Each child and the adult sit by a space of a large sheet of paper. They have brushes and bamboo skewers and India ink. One child and the adult experiment with the media, three children begin drawing flowers (Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1 Ink on cartridge paper.

There is a lot of activity elsewhere in the classroom. A small group of children are standing around the table of drawers, watching them, however the four children that are drawing are very quiet, hardly speaking.

One child paints a black shape, which he enlarges during the course of the drawing episode. Another child carefully draws a schematic flower then proceeds to obliterate it with the ink and a large brush. This child demonstrates some unexpected change of direction by covering over their initial drawing.

The teacher then asks the four children to move around the paper so they are now forced to work on top of, or around an existing drawing. Interestingly, the child who painted the large black shape proceeds to paint over the prior drawer’s efforts by obliterating their flower with large black ink strokes.

This collaborative drawing episode can be interpreted in different ways; one interpretation is to suggest that the group is working compatibly on a group task—no-one complained of having their drawings covered over or changed. Another interpretation is to say that each person made different drawings and also responded to others’ drawings differently. They did not simply continue the drawing that someone else had begun.

(Field observation notes from an intergenerational collaborative drawing episode, September 17, 2008) Intergenerational collaborative drawing (Knight 2008, 2009a, 2009b) enables adults and children to make drawings on the same paper surface at the same time. This is not the same as making a drawing ‘together’ because ‘Different dialogues co-exist and feed into the drawing event as a collection of multiple literacies’ (Knight, 2009a, p. 55). Each contributor works alongside, but not identically with the other drawers. As the field observation above suggests, a teacher can sit with a child or small groups of children and they can work on producing visualized evidence of what they each think about or comprehend on a particular issue or subject. They might produce one large collaborative drawing but the ideas contained within it are not identical.

This form of drawing is an important method for teachers and other educators to consider because it enhances opportunities for communication between adults and children in educational and other integenerational contexts. Intergenerational collaborative drawing is highly useful then because it helps adults and young children to work together in grasping diverse concepts across all areas of learning. It also helps to attest that drawing is an intellectual, academic activity, assisting children and adults to encounter and understand a range of concepts and ideas across subject areas.

It is important to embed drawing into everyday learning because children use drawing to help them realize their thoughts and actions (Pillar, 1998; Weber & Mitchell, 1995). Children are regarded in this chapter as meaning-makers, in that they pull on a diverse collection of ideas, experiences, imaginings, and information to form their opinions, learning and relationships with the world. Drawing is a central repository for this so children should have high-quality opportunities to use drawing to assist in their thinking and imagination.

Children utilize combinations of movement, dialogue, and sound while they draw (Coates, 2002; Wright, 2007). These complex inter-textual practices necessitate receptive pedagogies that help the teacher to make sense of a child’s way of communicating, to help tap into a child’s engagement with education effectively. Without this, ‘the rootedness of texts in visual imagery is neglected’ (Weber & Mitchell, 1995, p. 33) and children’s drawings can be simply passed off as formative attempts at art making.

When adults and children use drawing as a way of exploring and conceptualizing diverse aspects of learning, they often use different symbols and marks. Drawing collaboratively actively liberates adult and child drawers from creating ‘pictures’ laden with the conventional schema that often flood children’s drawings. It also engages drawers, and importantly, adult drawers, in an expanded process of cognitive discovery. For adults who do not draw regularly, not only does this engage them in far more authentic drawing practices, it also helps to avoid situations whereby a child presents a completed drawing to the adult for them to interpret. Visual interpretation of completed drawings is a problematized task for educators who may not grasp that the marks in a young child’s drawing pay attention to specifics such as emotion, movement, smell, taste, etc. (Bodrova & Leong, 2003; Braswell & Callanan, 2003; Matthews, 1999), or that the image of a figure or detail may not represent a particular meaning. Interpretations therefore leave sizeable gaps between the perceived meaning of the drawing and the actual meanings the child wove into it. This has significant implications if those interpretations form part of a developmental snapshot or report on the child.

Collaborative drawing is a dynamic enactment whereby drawers find out how much they and others know because it initiates deep exploration of cognitive concepts. Educators can undertake collaborative drawings to initiate dialogue about curriculum-based or diverse learning concepts. Working in collaboration on drawings can give educators a greater insight into their students than they may have otherwise.

The Drawing as Valorized Object

The complex nature of what children draw and the reasons why they draw is theorized upon via a number of philosophical paradigms. Developmental psychologists used children’s drawings to help define various aspects of childhood growth (Nicholls & Kennedy, 1992; Porath, 1993; Ring, 2006; Toomela, 1999), including examining drawings produced by gifted children to gain further understandings into the nature of their giftedness (Harrison, 1999). Sociocultural investigations have focused on wider contexts, such as whether world societies influence a child’s communication development as they progress through early childhood (Ivashkevich, 2006; Rogoff, 2003; Seidman & Beilin, 1984), or why drawing is discarded as a key literacy as children move ‘from nursery to the top of the infant school’ (Coates, 2002, p. 25). Cultural studies texts also focus on drawing in its wider contexts and suggest that drawn images refer to actual things, or to things experienced, and these can affect the expectations of what schema might appear in drawings, particularly if developmental analyses are used (Weber & Mitchell, 1995).

Research texts can be incredibly influential on pedagogy, and can quickly embed into daily practices and become ‘truths’. Developmental theories particularly have had significant impact on how drawings are regarded. For example: ‘By age 5, boys and girls tend to develop separate styles and preferences for their graphic expression’ (Weber & Mitchell, 1995, p. 36). Such statements are loaded as they reveal how drawings might be selectively searched for particular symbolic indicators to help uphold the theory.

Because adults often utilize such paradigmatic theories to help define children’s learning (Ball, 1994; Braswell & Callanan, 2003; Matthews, 1999) it is important to raise awareness that children’s drawings often serve a wider purpose than asserted in those popular theories. It is useful to take a metaphysical step back at this point and cast a wider look at the relationships between drawing and visual art, and particularly, children’s drawings in relation to children’s art. This is important because, along with popular learning theories, educator beliefs about art can often direct how and why drawing is undertaken in a classroom. The beliefs and valorizations that help to define what ‘is’ art are often informed by wider societal contexts about what is art, what is ‘good’ art, and how to create ‘good’ art. For many non-Indigenous Australian adults, making art is likely to be about creating something that looks pleasing to the eye in terms of its color, line, composition, and balance. It must fulfill the criteria established by Modernist aesthetics scholars such as Bell who asserted that art must have ‘significant form’ (cited in Warburton, 2003, p. 10); meaning what is produced must incite a strong emotional response in the viewer due to its aesthetic powers. Aesthetics in this context relates to a form of pleasing beauty. In drawing, one common but significant preconception about being a ‘good drawer’ extends on Modernist aesthetics of making something that has pleasing beauty, and includes an assumption that artists conjure up and then set about replicating a pre-existing image or idea seen in the mind’s eye. The skill of the drawer is seen to rest on their ability to accurately replicate this complete, imagined vision. However, interviews with artist drawers tend instead to tell of accounts of working toward a vague idea (Ambrus & Aston, 2009; Simblet, 2004), or just working without any idea of what might emerge (Tan, 2010).

I suggest that approaches to arts and drawing practice are what most clearly differ between artists and non-artists. While artists certainly push their artistic capacities all the time, they can be a lot easier on themselves, in terms of what they want to finish up with, than non-artists. I have heard plenty of non-artists (in this case, student teachers) declare, ‘My drawing hasn’t turned out how I wanted—I’m no good at drawing.’ This seems to suggest how differently non-artists and artists approach their work.

There is a clear need to provide educators with explicit information about the importance of drawing and the role it plays in a child’s mental growth and in their intellectual development, as well as the more experimental and less product driven attitude that artists take toward their work. If educators can critically examine their personal definitions of artistic practice and competency, and their understandings of popular developmental paradigms, they can change their approaches to drawing in their classrooms. Such critical examination can help educators realize that what children draw cannot be accounted for simply by imagining it to be primarily an expression of a particular developmental stage or that their drawings aren’t always beautiful and aesthetic. Educators can begin to understand that children’s drawings are produced for many reasons and purposes and that they emerge from a range of sources including stories, metaphysical constructions, and non-human factors such as spaces, locations, atmosphere, time, etc., and are not always about something the child has actually experienced.

Educators need appropriate guidance about the importance of drawing in relation to all aspects of learning. If drawing can be regarded as a process for thinking, unde...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Ways of Seeing—the Arts
• Ways of Seeing—children
• Ways of Seeing—curriculum and Pedagogy
• List of Contributors
• Index