When Drawing Proliferates: Toward an Onto-Epistemological Pedagogy of Children’s Drawing

Abstract

Children’s drawing is an important part of early childhood learning experiences. While young children seem to have little need for drawing instruction, classrooms where drawing features as a central component to curriculum provide material conditions that can sustain its practice. In this paper, I employ a new material heuristic to explore how drawing and the drawings children produce are implicated in the production of pedagogical matter. To do so, I invite readers to visit with a Reggio-inspired preschool classroom where, for the past 3 years, I have participated together with children and teachers in a research relationship focusing on young children’s learning and early childhood pedagogy.

Understanding Children’s Drawings as Sociomaterial Assemblages of Voice during Pandemic Times

“…Drawing is both a noun, a picture someone has drawn, and a verb, the act of drawing that thing (Sunday, 2018). Children's drawings are important for both the agency of children, in creating a piece of artwork, and children's voice, enabling them to express feelings or emotions that may be difficult for them to verbalize (Moula et al, 2021).…”

“…Children's drawings are important for both the agency of children, in creating a piece of artwork, and children's voice, enabling them to express feelings or emotions that may be difficult for them to verbalize (Moula et al, 2021). Drawing can also help children to observe things they might never have noticed otherwise (Sunday, 2018). From an educator's or parent's perspective, drawings can provide insight into children's complex emotions and personalities while they are quite young (Maxwell, 2015), and highlight what children find enjoyable or important (Ahmad, 2018).…”

“…It forms one of the first steps of communication, even prior to language acquisition (Ahmad, 2018). Young children use drawing to understand the real world by presenting, digesting and synthesizing various phenomena; drawings thus form the scaffolding for early learning (Harrison et al, 2007;Sunday, 2018). In drawings, sociomaterial objects may be shared by children to show such learning (Rose, 2016).…”