Thinking and Learning Through Drawing

In Primary Classrooms

Gill Hope

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781446246351
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Methods for Reading

?The text is clear and accessible and gives a fascinating overview of how drawing can help children to learn and understand the thinking of others…It is highly recommended for all students and practitioners interested in understanding more about how children express their ideas and theories about the world? - Early Years Update

?This book is an invaluable resource for anyone who recognises the potential of ?drawing? as an essential element for developing thinking and learning in the Primary Classroom...and a ?must read? for those who are sceptical!....This is a fascinating read that invokes a variety of feelings including a sense of wonder and curiosity about the many facets of drawing, which leaves you with a thirst to try out more and explore ways of releasing the untapped potential of ?drawing? in your own classroom? - thinkingclassroom.co.uk

Children use drawing as a means through which they create, develop, communicate and record their thoughts and ideas. Whether it?s to play, or to express feelings and meaning, drawing enables them to learn about the world, explore their imaginations, and to invent and present new ideas.

With an extensive background in teaching and researching children?s uses of drawing, Gill Hope describes the ways in which multiple forms of drawing are used by Primary school children. She explains why it should be actively promoted as a means of supporting thinking and learning across a wide range of subject areas, and provides practical support for teachers.

Demonstrating the importance of drawing, and combining a thematic approach with practical guidance, this informative and enjoyable book:

- widens teachers? understanding of the multiple uses of drawing;

- shows how children can be guided to use it to support thinking and learning;

- explores the range of applications in which drawing can be used across all areas of the curriculum;

- looks to the future and at the ever increasing importance of graphic literacy.

Providing a fresh insight into the uses of drawing as a powerful tool which supports children?s thinking and learning, this book will be of interest to everyone involved in the development of children?s capabilities, including teachers, student teachers and teaching assistants.

Dimension 1

Drawing to play

The need to play is essential to human intellectual growth and emotional well-being. Children deprived of play through illness, hunger, trauma, abuse or other deprivation often demonstrate signs of emotional disturbance. The greatest of human minds, in fields as diverse as science, technology, art, music, religion, politics or philosophy, all play. They use the capabilities honed in childhood to imagine, dream, create, consider and invent new ways of solving physical, social, intellectual, aesthetic or spiritual problems. Playing with ideas is not just the highest form of human intellectual activity, it is also the most fundamental. It is where we all begin: to wonder, to think and to become independent rational beings. Although unable to articulate their thoughts, a babe in arms looking at the world over their mother’s shoulders begins to want to play, to want more than the comforting rhythmic motion of mother’s footsteps and the flickering light and shadows that pass by. Humans come pre-programmed to need to interact with other humans, to learn, to communicate and to invent. Coupled to language, purposeful communicative mark-making moved Homo sapiens ever further away from their nearest humanoid cousins until they became a separate species that dominates the world, for good or ill.

Playing with mark-making and imbuing it with symbolic meaning was a huge intellectual leap for humankind, probably greater than any other evolutionary development. It enabled out-of-range communication. It established the power of knowledge and its transfer to others. It externalized thought and enabled review and discussion. It enabled people to play with ideas in a new and powerful way. All these possibilities are learnt anew by each succeeding human generation, learning to create ideas and make meaning through marks on surfaces.

‘Drawing to play’, therefore, is the first dimension of drawing to be examined in this book because it is both the most basic and yet the most powerful use of drawing. The chapter looks first at the way in which infants and young children discover and use drawing to represent and investigate the world around them. It considers the ways in which children continue to hone these skills through play, and how teachers can enable them to develop their knowledge, skills and confidence in handling a wide range of drawing materials. The way in which children use their drawings to support their games is also discussed and, without too much straying into the territory of the dimension of ‘Drawing to mean’, how they exploit drawing’s symbolic nature in so doing. The final section of ‘Drawing to play’ makes that bridge into the ‘Drawing to mean’ through focusing on the playing with ideas that underpins both the child’s play and that of the greatest inventive minds, and how drawing can enable that most powerful of playing.

Vygotsky (1986) claimed that consciousness and control appear after a function has been practised unconsciously. There is truth in this, that fluency with any media is vital before it can be used for purposeful, creative action, but there is also a conscious determination to learn and master the function in the first place. Young children are so highly motivated to learn that this determination to mastery appears as play. They are committed to an activity and practise its skills with a joy that leaves adults standing. Never again in our lives do we learn so much about so many things so quickly. The continuation of that powerful, playful determination through childhood and adolescence into adulthood is the distinguishing mark of genius, whether at a personal or historic level of capability.

So, let us begin at the beginning …

Early mark-making

Around about her first birthday, Rachel stopped having her afternoon naps. This was irritating for her 3-year-old brother, Ralph, since this meant the disappearance of mum-and-son time, tucked up with books or on the floor with card games or at the table with crayons and paper. Now baby sister was awake and part of it. One day, mum had Rachel on her lap while Ralph played with pencils and crayons. Rachel reached out and mum handed her a pen with the lid on to keep her amused. She pushed it around like Ralph but it made no mark so she dropped it. Realizing what she wanted, mum gave her a pen with the lid off and pulled some paper within reach. Rachel pushed the pen around the paper and it made marks and she was visibly pleased with herself. She was doing what her big brother was doing. She was on her way to being a big girl.

In this anecdote of an infant’s first use of a pen to make marks on paper are many of the ingredients that are part of learning to draw. First, it was social learning, part of the normal interaction between adult and young child. Second, it was initiation into the world of a more mature way of thinking and doing, and provided intellectual and emotional satisfaction. Rachel had analysed the nature of the process: pushing the pen around made marks on the paper. She had watched carefully how it was done and felt ready to try it for herself. This was an intellectual shift from wanting something someone else had and exploring it in her own way. This was purposefully copying exactly what someone else was doing in order to create the same effect. When she was successful, the satisfaction was obvious.

Rachel grew up to become a marine biologist, contributing to knowledge of the impact and management of fisheries. Ralph works in the world of investment banking, creating software to support international trade on the stock markets. Both are fluently confident in their ability to use graphics in a range of ways and situations, to support the development of thinking, communicate observations, generate ideas and demonstrate abstract relationships, in situations as diverse as home DIY, quick sketch maps to show where they live, to support hobbies and so on, as well as in their very different work environments. This taken-for-granted graphic fluency developed from the ability to make marks on a surface, combined with the later realization that these marks can hold and create meaning.

Early drawing activity is largely exploratory, purely experimenting with the process of mark-making, and not always with appropriate materials or surfaces. Playing with food is often an exploration of mark-making that does not always win the approval of parents, especially if this involves flicking. Running around on the beach trailing a stick is a more acceptable large-scale form of exploratory mark-making. Even children who are already drawing recognizable pictures will enjoy simply running and making a trail across this huge open space.

Frequently, young children become obsessed with specific aspects of the world, which they explore repeatedly. They have seen a pattern somewhere and want to discover its scope and potential. It might be looking underneath things (chairs, beds, stones, cars in the street) or through things (cardboard tubes, rolled newspaper, holes in fences) and may include something that embarrasses the parent or carer (the imaginary friend). Young children’s mark-making often reflects these current interests and the building of the inner schema to which it is contributing.

Three stories of infants at around age 2 years, which follow, illustrate the way in which young children explore their current schemas through drawing lines.

Zheng

Zheng’s inner imperative seemed to be taking a line on a journey, not necessarily making a mark, limited only by the size of the surface available. Trails were drawn with sticks, bike wheels, pull-along toys, or her imagination. By age 2 years and 6 months Zheng saw routes drawn out everywhere. Long journeys went along walls, across parks, through puddles, round trees, upstairs, downstairs and across and around pieces of paper. Her drawings seemed like long looping snail trails, around and around and across the page, the only breaks being where she unintentionally skipped the pencil across the page or where she decided to start a new trail on the same sheet.

Zheng was exploring paths, tracks and routes both on the macro and micro scale. She was developing a sense of space, line and loci. The marks she made on paper were analogues of the routes in her head. She was not consciously modelling any one of her journeys (or even a combination of them) but simply exploring the schema of ‘journey’ in another medium: crayon on paper.

Lloyd

At a similar age, Lloyd’s passion was corners. He would ‘hide’ in them, feel them with his fingers, trace the meeting points of their inside edges, and play ‘bo’ round them. On a visit to his grandparents, he enjoyed whizzing his toy cars around the inside of a large wooden tray, like a race track. His granddad laid a piece of paper inside the tray to protect the picture from the car’s wheels, which prompted Lloyd to run off, come back with a pen and trace the route round the edges, into the corners, across the middle, back and forth. He was highly animated, totally absorbed and thrilled at the result. Then, satiated, tray and paper and pen were abandoned and he was off to play a different game altogether.

Lloyd was exploring topology in a different way from Zheng. Seeing, in a flash of inspiration that would do credit to any adult scientist, that a pen could provide a permanent trace of the route, he explored and exploited it to the full. When he had completed his task he was triumphant: yes! Eureka! The process of drawing had enabled the bridge between outer reality and inner developing schema. By using drawing to support his thinking, Lloyd had creatively explored and internally conceptualized the role and properties of corners within an enclosed space.

Gurdip

In contrast, Gurdip (younger than Lloyd and Zheng, just short of his second birthday) was a dots and dashes man. Short sharp marks, preferably noisy or scraping, so that his mother had given him a thick notepad to absorb the impact of his penwork. Then he discovered going round and round, experimenting with speed, pressure of mark and colour, making really deep grooves in the notepad, round and round. Gurdip started humming then brmming to himself. His father asked ‘Is it a car?’ and drew one on the next sheet of paper for him. Gurdip did more round schemas on that sheet too and brmmed loudly. The noise seemed to please daddy more than mummy.

Gurdip had experienced an interesting encounter with an adult’s perception of what he was doing that would sow seeds of thought for the future. His father assumed a connection to a car but Gurdip’s brmming was just an accompanying doodling noise while he was absorbed with watching the satisfyingly deep grooves he was making into the notepad. He watched his father draw the car, stored it away in his head and carried on with what he was doing. He has realized how pictures in books are made. Adults make them with pens.

All three of these children had used drawing as an analogue for motor movement. Gurdip’s father, in interpreting the purpose of the activity as symbolic, sowed the seeds in his son’s mind of the symbolic potential of mark-making. For Zheng and Lloyd, this would come in a different way on a different day. Whichever route is taken by the child, whether through exploration on their own or aided serendipitously or intentionally by an adult, they have discovered a powerful tool for exploring and developing new ideas. Once they realize the symbolic potential of drawing, they have a new tool to aid and support their thinking, a means of expression with which they can play and experiment.

In affluent countries, because of the access that children have to drawing materials, drawing and language usually first develop within the same period of time (between ages 1–3 years). Where children do not have such access, researchers have reported that the kinds of drawings that they associate with pre-schoolers do not occur. When given pencils and paper, older novice artists progress quickly from initial experimentation with the medium to making images. Reports that these subjects have ‘progressed’ at an apparently accelerated rate without going through the ‘stages’ the researchers expect, based on young children’s work in their home countries, should, perhaps be treated with caution. The desire to make representational marks is so ubiquitous that it is more likely that it is the kind of mark-making that is being sought by the researchers that is new to the research subject and that they are mastering at an (apparently) accelerated rate. In some cultures, infants’ play is perceived as freedom to do as they like before learning, rather than as part of learning, as may be the view in the cultures from which the researchers have come. Some artistic traditions are passed down through a close-knit family apprenticeship system that does not include the rest of the population at all, and a child within such a family is expected to begin to learn this when they reach a certain age.

There is no ‘natural’ universal artistic development, despite attempts by some researchers to find and plot one. Young children play, experiment, adapt and learn to use a whole range of mark-making techniques from quite an early age but in different ways and in different cultural and social contexts around the world, and at different times. This book is culturally situated in the UK in the early years of the twenty-first century and should be read with this in mind. The references to school years and ages of children are related to that cultural situation, and recommendations for teacher action should be read as relevant within that cultural context. No universal prescriptions are attempted or intended.

Playfulness and creativity

Aided by the acquisition of language, infants learn to compare, contrast, differentiate and categorize their experiences and perceptions of the world around them. In their playing and their making, young children use their perceptions of the similarities between things, the analogies which they perceive all around them, sometimes by serendipity, sometimes by intent, using and combining them playfully and creatively to design a self-propelling shared world. In this, they are acting in exactly the same way as adult designers. Hence the term ‘designerly play’ employed by Baynes (1989) to describe such creative playfulness.

From about 1 year old, children begin to repeat back recognizable sounds which parents accept and reinforce and remember as their child’s first words. The infant learns quickly that everything in the world has a sound label and all they have to do now is to find out what these all are, as fast as possible. That a mark made on paper can have a name label other than ‘crayoning’ or ‘painting’ but can be called ‘dog’, ‘man’ or ‘mummy’ is a considerable conceptual leap into symbolic abstraction, yet one which infants appear to take in their stride. It also changes the child’s view of themselves, as agentic, as a creator of imagery. They have entered into a world parallel and yet very different to the world of playing with toys or even of spoken language. The mark they make on paper can be kept, examined, reviewed, displayed for all to see in a way that ephemeral speech and play cannot. Early meta-cognition, thinking about thinking, is aided by drawing.

In the beginning, the child is exploring mark-making for its own sake. As the idea dawns that these marks might represent something, scribbles obligingly may represent things for the adult enquirer. It is difficult, if not impossible, to know if this assigning of name to scribbling occurs to the infant without adult prompting since many, if not most, drawings are done with adult supervision at this stage. The fear of infants drawing on wallpaper, curtains and other household objects is too real to allow them access to drawing materials far beyond the watchful eye of an adult or older sibling. Thus the idea that drawings represent something is so early planted that it is realistically impossible to decide on its genesis. What is clear, is that almost as soon as infants decide that drawing can represent things, it does. Scribbles declared to be ‘rabbit’ appear to have long ears. Ones declared ‘car’ have wheels. ‘Mummy’ has a round head and eyes. It is a self-propelling iterative game. It is soon realized by many infants that adults will produce drawings for them, and the dialogue begins.

This dialogue is between a socially accepted way of representing people, houses, animals and so forth, and the child’s desire to communicate. Young children are trying to learn these conventions just as keenly as they are trying to come to terms with a whole culture full of other social conventions. Very soon they realize that trying to be an adult straightaway is a bit too difficult right now, so they concentrate their efforts on becoming a bigger boy or bigger girl. By about age 3, apprenticeship into becoming a child in their own society is well under way and this includes learning how bigger boys and girls draw. This is learnt from older siblings, cousins, neighbours and friends at home, nursery and in school Reception classes. Drawing is just one of the games that young children play alongside each other.

As children’s drawing capabilities develop, we see not only the development of their motor control of the mark-making tool, but also their growing awareness of their environment, both physical and conceptual. Early drawings are frequently of mummy, the car, the dog or family. Interestingly, few children begin their graphic career with drawings of ‘me’. The evidence...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Drawing to think
• Dimension 1: Drawing to play
• Dimension 2: Drawing to mean
• Dimension 3: Drawing to feel
• Dimension 4: Drawing to see
• Dimension 5: Drawing to know
• Dimension 6: Drawing to design
• Finale: Drawing to conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index