As teachers seek to reflect children's diverse experience in the subject matter they present and in the questions they explore, they must also embrace children's multifaceted ways of knowing. Their major pedagogical challenge is to help children transform what they know into modes of representation that allow for a full range of human experience. In their lives outside of school, children 'naturally move between art, music, movement, mathematics, drama, and language as ways to think about the world [. . .]. It is only in schools that students are restricted to using one sign system at a time. ' (Short et al., 2000: 160). This study uses young children's drawings about reading and writing as an innovative way of investigating their perceptions and understandings of literacy across the broad contexts of their lives. The study challenges the politics of classroom practices that privilege language-dependent modes of representation over other modes.

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Children make metaphoric use of symbols that are available to them at any one time and endow these symbols with a variety of new meanings (Steedman, 1982). From a practical standpoint, this means that children bring their own interpretive framework and manner of appropriation to the various cultural materials to which they are exposed (Nicolopoulou, Scales, & Weintraub, 1994). Our early research into images of literacy began with the basic question "Do children have visual images of literacy?" Over the past four years, we have collected over 270 drawings that represent children's constructions of reading and writing across the broad contexts of their lives (see e.g., McKay & Kendrick, 1999, 2001a, 2001b). In the process, we not only discovered that children have very rich images of literacy, but that their drawings reveal complex understandings about the multi-faceted and interactive nature of literacy. Moreover, how children perceive themselves, and others, in relation to literacy is evident in their drawings. Revisiting Children's Images of Literacy http://www.langandlit.ualberta.ca/archives/vol51papers/0304_ken_mck/i...

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