Mixed messages: the role and value of drawing in early education

Drawings as spaces for intellectual play

“…Fourth, in relation to recent critiques of policy-centred views of drawing (Hall, 2009) and play (Wood, 2010), the findings support a more complex conceptualisation of these activities. The evidence from many studies indicates that the children's drawings are not just exploratory devices but transformative devices (Anning and Ring, 2004;Carruthers and Worthington, 2011) that are used to create bridges between different contexts.…”

“…The evidence implies that educators need deep understanding of the meaningfulness of children's play, and the processes that link play and drawing. However, it is argued here that efforts to understand children's perspectives in research and in education settings should acknowledge the tensions that exist between the limited educational purposes of play and drawing in curriculum policies in England (Hall, 2009;Wood 2010), and children's own purposes. Those purposes include the playful ways in which children re-make the world in patterns of their own choosing, through possible ways of being, acting and relating to others.…”

“…Within an educational and developmental discourse, Hall (2009) has analysed the ways in which drawing is often positioned as an emergent or pre-writing skill, as evidenced in national curriculum frameworks in England. This position has been influenced by Vygotsky's theories on the prehistory of written language (1978), because socio-cultural theories of development propose that early forms of drawing and writing are undifferentiated in spontaneous graphic representations.…”

“…Vygotsky privileged (as other researchers have done subsequently) the progression from drawing to writing which has arguably set the pattern for the ways in which drawing (like play) has been positioned as the servant to progression in forms of disciplinary knowledge (Hall, 2009).…”

“…The first section reviews contrasting theoretical and disciplinary perspectives on play, and argues that the focus on play as learning and development has obscured children's meanings and purposes, and the importance of play as a social practice (Wood, 2010). This is linked to a critique of the limitations of research on the educational purposes of drawing as a pre-cursor to artistic and literacy development (Hall, 2009). The second and third sections report the empirical research, focusing respectively on the research design and methods, and the data analysis, which centres on the three interlinked themes of playing at, in and with drawings.…”