Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Volume 9 Number 4 2008 www.wwwords.co.uk/CIEC
Communication and Transformation through Collaboration: rethinking drawing activities in early childhood LINDA KNIGHT University of Canberra, Australia
ABSTRACT This article is a study of the arts in early childhood as a way of learning, for both children and their teachers. The author suggests that drawing can be a powerful tool for collaborative approaches to pedagogy. When teachers draw with children, pathways of communication can be opened, and the collaborative exercise can trigger processes of transformation for both adult and child. In order to present challenges to more traditional, hands-off pedagogical practices in arts education, this article is an account of reflexive arts pedagogies, and how they can work to improve communication and understandings between adults and children. Within the educational contexts of Australian preschooling and primary schooling, the author examines the process of collaborative drawing, and how this can enable a process of transformation. Her analysis, and the accompanying examples of reflexive practices, combine complementary lenses, socio-cultural and postmodern, that she sees as working in harmony to produce new possibilities, in arts education in particular, and, more broadly, in early childhood education.
Introduction In the spirit of the aims of this special issue of Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, I am interested in how children learn through the arts, and focus particularly on an activity that most of us observe children doing every day – drawing. Drawing can be a rich site for inquiry and research into our work as teachers. I propose that particular ways of drawing collaboratively can open up pathways of communication, and facilitate processes of transformation for both adult and child. I suggest that through observations of the multimodal ways that children interact with materials during the drawing process, teachers can revisit their own bodily practice. When adults closely observe, reflect and are informed by this multimodal bodily practice, they can re-educate their own expressive behaviours, while contributing to the drawing alongside the children. The notion of drawing with children is a departure from a firmly entrenched mantra, at least in Australian early childhood settings, of ‘hands-off children’s art’. Much of the twentieth-century literature into early childhood learning has focused on the individual child (Edwards, 2005). The steady but significant shift towards looking at early childhood through a sociocultural lens (Rogoff, 1990; Robbins, 2003b; Rogoff, 2003; Edwards, 2005; Vasquez, 2006) acknowledges that fundamental influences on children’s lives occur through their interactions with family, environment, and cultural traditions. New theories and complementary methodological lenses can challenge long-established pedagogical practices embedded in more positivist paradigms. This article begins with a discussion on communication, transformation and collaboration in early childhood pedagogies. Within the early childhood educational contexts of Australian preschooling and primary schooling, I discuss collaborative drawing as a teaching and research activity, as well as a learning experience for both child and adult. I also examine the Art/art debate
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Communication and Transformation through Collaboration and the complexities of implementing quality drawing activities in early childhood, drawing on Bourdieu’s theories of field and habitus. The article then focuses on the need for reflexive teaching practices to help understand how children draw. Finally, I discuss how such reflective practices can inform a collaborative pedagogy that centres on the act of adults and children drawing together, which in turn challenges traditional early childhood pedagogies of teaching and learning. Communication, Transformation, Collaboration The need to develop good communication skills between adults and children is particularly pertinent within the early childhood classroom. When children enter an early childhood setting, they negotiate a new social environment. As they enter these unfamiliar environments they encounter and adjust to new common perspectives, adding to the ones that continue to exist in their home environments. They need to adapt to new ways of learning, away from their familiar home surroundings and the systems used there by their caregivers. The strategies employed by adult staff often help children to acquire those common perspectives. Rogoff (2003) maintains that, to build meaning, ‘partners seek a common perspective or language through which to communicate their ideas’ (p. 285). Strategies in the early childhood context commonly include variously verbal and demonstrated behaviour and modelling, through planned activities such as games, reading together, discussion, songs, artmaking. These are presumed to reflect the strategies used by caregivers in the child’s social environment, suggesting that young children effectively rely upon and learn by communication to understand and learn about their world. Rogoff’s socio-cultural research into the importance of the role of caregiver as educator provided new understandings about children and culture. More recently, Kilderry et al (2004) highlighted an emergent body of work that considers young children as active contributors themselves in the research process. Such research projects where children have active participatory rights (Mac Naughton et al, 2007) begin to undermine historically dominant, positivist and modernist models of how young children learn and conceptualise their surroundings. When children hold a more vocal position in the research process (Kilderry et al, 2004), clearly, the emphasis is on children telling their own stories. While communication is the basis of quality early childhood teaching and learning, this is particularly so in relation to providing children with quality drawing experiences. Matthews’ (1999) observations of his own young children’s drawing development led him to insist that children benefit from some form of interaction with the adult, and that the interaction emerges out of a shared exchange between them. He suggests that ‘each partner tunes in to the rhythmic periodicities of the other’s patterned actions’ and that these actions can take the form of ‘facial expressions and vocalisations’ (p. 14). The communication between an adult and a child when they are drawing, then, is important, even though this is not solely reliant upon verbal forms, which are otherwise seen as ‘instruction’ in the educational context. Many of the threads weaving through this article – communication, drawing, collaboration, teaching and learning – have some relationship with processes of transformation. Grbich (2004) identifies transformation as a critical outcome of reflexive research that seeks to develop knowledge. The researcher reflexively transforms his or her understanding of the issues under inquiry, the participants are transformed by being involved, and then the readers of the research are transformed by the information contained within it. Indeed, transformation is ideally a major outcome of early childhood research generally. A major objective of research into collaborative drawing is to try and transform both adults’ and children’s enculturated, assumed practices around drawing in the early childhood education context. For teachers, there is a desire to know how the child constructs knowledge and transforms his or her abilities through participation (Edwards, 2005). But teachers too can transform their existing teaching abilities when given similar opportunities to participate and reflexively analyse their pedagogical practices. McNaughton & Krentz’s (2007) project aimed to expand the use of Reggio Emilia principles with undergraduate and postgraduate students. Their research details how the experience transformed their students’ views of themselves as learners, as they began to critically understand their decision-making and question their prior assumptions about teaching practices.
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Linda Knight Collaboration can be used as a powerful teaching, learning and communicating tool within the field of educational research (McNaughton & Krentz, 2007). This participatory approach is crucial in early childhood education, as a model that involves and supports young children, as they formatively learn about the concept of education and their inhabited space within it. Although the term ‘collaboration’ offers up images of teams working in harmony, levels of tension can arise through the inter-relational working dynamic of two parties, whether they be plural or single, peered or not (Bray et al, 2000). Each participant in fact brings their own expectations, constructions and behaviours to any research project. It is these tensions that make the experience a worthwhile endeavour. Such tensions, in the early childhood context, and particularly in reference to collaborative drawing, form an important part of the meaning-making process. Harper (1998a,b, in Pink, 2001) highlights the need for a review of the researcher/informant balance, through a re-examination of collaborative and ethnographic practices. One collaborative methodology in relation to visual ethnography involves ‘researcher and informant consciously working together to produce visual images and specific types of knowledge’ (Pink, 2001, p. 40). Drawing Of all areas of the early childhood curriculum, the arts have suffered most, perhaps, from misdirected assumptions on a practical level surrounding content and delivery. This is not to say that, in the Australian context, all areas of arts education (dance, drama, media, music, and visual arts) have not been researched at a theoretical level in the past. Extensive collections of children’s drawings, for example, have been gathered by researchers, particularly with the purpose of constructing developmental age/stage theory (for more on this, see Ring, 2006). Drawing, perhaps more so than any other discipline used by children, allows for some acute views into the child’s mind. If approached with care and rigour, the contents of children’s drawings can tell the researcher complex stories. But researchers need to proceed with caution when ‘analysing’ children’s drawings, and ‘reading’ these drawings interpretively. It can be difficult to interpret a young child’s drawings sometimes unless there has been a dialogue about the work. If the young child demonstrates a reduced vocabulary it can be doubly difficult to obtain a detailed description of the drawing, which often leaves the teacher having to guess its meaning. Working collaboratively as the drawings are constructed – working with the child as a co-constructor of the image – can give the teacher a greater insight into the child’s intentions, because they are able to observe at close range how the child’s drawings emerge. Even so, research that produces typologies of children’s drawings, or detailed observations and analysis of childrens’ drawings, may eventually be of very little value to teachers, and have little impact on their ways of working with children. Socio-cultural studies can help to expand our understandings of why children draw (Brooks, 2004), and can also offer findings that bear closer association to the everyday practices of teachers. Early childhood drawing activities carry significant potency as cultural tools. According to Vasquez (2006), it is the cultural tools that ‘are instrumental to the social processes that give rise to cultural and cognitive development’ (p. 36). The child’s patterns of drawing emerge from culturally embedded factors, such as the aesthetic skills learnt, the symbol systems used, and the pedagogical tactics teachers use in the transference of those symbol systems to their students. In his research into the construction of meaning in childhood artmaking, Matthews (1999) observed that ‘the cluster of actions we see in infancy and early childhood forms the substrata for later models of reality’ (p. 6). This expressive ‘substrata’ underpins the importance of understanding that what children do in infancy sets up processes of later practices. Matthews’ (1999) research and Rogoff’s (2003) investigations into the role of the caregiver help to present a paradigmatic basis for constructing collaborative drawing activities in early childhood educational settings. At this point, I add Bourdieu’s (1993) theories on field and habitus to the conversation. It is possible for teachers to reflexively access drawings in reference to the cultural habitus of a child. Later in this article, I expand on the usefulness of Bourdieu’s work to this discussion. Collaborations between teachers and children can provide teachers with opportunities for facilitating and understanding the children’s expressive drawings. With workable guiding
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Communication and Transformation through Collaboration principles for collaborative drawing, teachers can begin to understand the fluctuations that occur in a developing child’s drawn expressions. The guiding principles would encourage drawing episodes where the teacher and child work in an interrelated way, collaborating through a rotating exchange of leadership, to forge a deeper mutual understanding of each other’s cultural field and how that impacts on their own. The next section of this article provides a more detailed account of how collaborative drawing looks in practice. Collaborative Drawing The first important point to make is that, in the context of this article, collaborative drawing is not necessarily concerned with the aesthetic. The examples provided here (see Figures 1, 2 and 3) are somewhat of a departure from the more pleasing images of young children’s drawings that many have learned to expect, and read as evidence of children’s ‘developing artistry’. These drawings are as much about learning experiences and communication, as they are about ‘art’. Drawings are created across the world and across cultures by people for many reasons. In the school context, ‘sketching provides support for all my students, regardless of ability or age’ (McNamara, 2003, p. 33). When the aesthetic objective is taken away from drawing, when drawing is instead used as a way of communicating to understand all aspects of learning, it can be a great liberator, engaging all types of learners, not just those who have a ‘talent’ for artmaking. The purpose of planning for and implementing drawing activities within this context also is chiefly to provide students and teachers with a meaningful context for problem solving through engaging the creative process, since ‘simply providing students with techniques for solving problems can lead to shallow understanding’ (Beghetto & Plucker, 2006, p. 322). More positivist techniques for drawing frequently involve giving students a series of instructional steps that follow a sequence of drawing from the beginning of the work to the end. Deep, meaningful drawing, even if there is a general conceptual goal being aimed for (I want to draw a cat), cannot be planned. The drawn response needs to emerge. If the teacher is involved in part of that process through collaboration, they can be jointly constructing that conceptual goal, obtaining a deep insight into the child’s learning along the way. Collaborative drawing does not and should not exclude the child, and, in fact, aims to benefit all drawers equally. Teachers and children can engage in learning that does not have a predetermined conclusion. The child and teacher contribute equally to the conceptual goals of the drawing, which might not be a visual representation (i.e. let’s draw a cat together), but could focus more on finding a way of working through an initial idea to the production of a conclusion. Although collaborative drawing can occur in many different guises, in the context of this article collaborative drawing refers to adults and children drawing together on the same surface. In the fine arts, postmodern forms of practice have forced a move from the historical model of apprenticeship, whereby the young apprentice learnt his artistry through intense observation of the Master, to a discursively driven form of training based upon conceptual ideas (Cook, 1999, p. 294). Figure 1 shows a drawing that was produced over 19 minutes by an adult staff member and three children (aged three to four years). Through the initiation and observations of this collaborative drawing event, where adults and children drew together in an early childhood classroom, it is possible to gain glimpses into the child’s cultural practices. This example also shows how both adults and children can transform their ways of using of tools – in this case, the drawing implements and surface material. The stimulus behind this work was the reading of a children’s picture book about a chameleon that tricks a crocodile and a leopard. The drawing explored basic literacy concepts relating to character and narrative development based on this reading. Because the drawing was produced collaboratively, the image contains many varied visual responses. For example, one child randomly referenced her cubby house (Wendy house) at home, while another referenced an illustration of the leopard seen in the picture book. Components of the drawing have distinct differences, although they aren’t sitting separately on the paper. One child was extremely preoccupied with a dense overworking of oil pastel over a small area of the paper, while another child drew a linear deconstruction of the leopard character, separating fur markings, eyes, and body shape. The drawers have worked together to explore the stimulus concept, without it containing
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Linda Knight obviously ‘adult’ and ‘child’ schema. Importantly the adult did not try to impose a monocultural visual representation system on the children, but instead allowed them to explore their own systems for representing. Throughout the drawing episode she asked questions about what should be drawn, and the children responded to this by directing her about what they wanted included. Rogoff (2003) suggests that moving beyond personal systems of assumption (how a child’s drawing skills should progress schematically) relies upon recognition that each culture has quite different conceptual understandings of human development. In this instance the group had a shared cultural identity but the adult was willing to listen to and accept each child’s unpredictable choices for representing a variety of referents.
Figure 1. Oil pastel, coloured pencil, charcoal on white cartridge paper.
Figure 2 serves as an illustration of an approach to analysis that ‘emphasises the social origins of mental functioning’ (Ring, 2006, p. 64). It is possible to see and understand the relationships between how the child learns and his or her personal cultural surroundings.
Figure 2. Oil pastel, charcoal, pencil on white cartridge paper.
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Communication and Transformation through Collaboration This image demonstrates how a group of children (aged five to six years) and their teacher constructed a sequential narrative drawing, also around a literacy stimulus concept. The icons seen are the result of each drawer being able to collaboratively contribute ideas for a story, with the finished work containing many diverse but equally important contributions. In this short section of recorded dialogue it is possible to see how each drawer’s cultural concept of what a story is, and the collaborative way they build it, contributes to the end result. Adam: He’s going fish hunting. Adult: What’s happening here? Adam (to Ben): Why are you doing ginormous [sic] things? Do little. Ben: Why? Adam: Because look how teeny that is (pointing to his own drawing). Adult (to Ben): So what are you drawing here? Ben: A big river. Adam: Oh! That kind of goes with my story, you know why? That guy’s going hunting. Oh! You want me to draw some fish (in the river)? Ben: Yes!
In Figure 3, Stella (adult) and Toby (aged six) worked together on an ink drawing based on sculptural works at the National Gallery of Australia. Stella was surprised when Toby began to slowly and deliberately cover their fine line work with large black inked brushstrokes.
Figure 3. India ink, drawing ink on white cartridge paper.
Stella’s surprise might emerge because of an assumed position on drawing that could not accommodate the notion that a child would cover fine work with ‘scribble’. Development theory proposes that all children develop their drawing skills by moving ‘forward’ schematically (from scribbling to learning to draw recognisable things). Age/stage schema for reading children’s drawings produce a homogenised view of children, and leave no space for accounting for individuality, even amongst children from the same cultural background. The use of other lenses for reading children’s developing artistry allows for the acknowledgement of drawing as a potent ‘meaning-making tool’ (Brooks, 2004, p. 42). With such an analysis we can acquire valuable insights into how the individual child responds to stimuli and how learned behaviours are applied in the construction of those drawings. Socio-cultural analysis requires that the researcher sets aside some of the developmental assumptions about what the child should be drawing and, instead, focuses on what has been drawn.
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Linda Knight Art, Teaching, Research When knowledge acquisition is seen as culturally embedded rather than being individually constructed by the child (Edwards, 2005), then drawing can be analysed as a site of learning, with various educational discourses in play, in relation to the respective culture in which the classroom is situated (Robbins, 2003a,b; Vásquez, 2006). The children’s actions and behaviours can be understood as being shaped by the routines and traditions of their cultural community (Rogoff, 2003). The children then are culturally conceptualised, and this, in turn, shapes our definitions of early childhood education (Kilderry et al, 2004). In a classroom shaped by a teacher-directed culture, it is difficult to find out more about how children think if there are few ways to give children a voice in the classroom. There are any number of projects that effectively challenge the teacher-directed pedagogy principle (for more on this, see Palinscar’s [2005] review). Collaborative drawing is one way to invite young children to co-construct their cultural fields through visualisation. In a classroom shaped by Vygotsky’s (1978) theories of learning, the child’s developmental learning trajectory is understood as dependent upon a sequence, whereby ‘socialized speech ... is turned inward’ (p. 27). Children learn by initially interacting and receiving external information from more knowledgeable others, which they then internalise and process as personal understanding. This intermental to intramental knowledge sequence, in a Vygotskian framework, speaks a sequence that travels essentially in one direction – the child heads towards the more enculturated/knowledgeable position of the elder (older student or teacher). However, the sequence need not be one-directional, and Bourdieu’s theories of field and habitus (Bourdieu, 1984[1979], 1993) enable other possibilities for understanding these exchanges. In the case of the younger child heading towards the elder, there is an opportunity for the sequence to change direction, and allow for a two-way exchange between the adult and child. The adult is able to travel to the child’s position. This is possible because each is able to visit the other’s cultural field and learn from the experience. An understanding of the various cultural identities of educational settings (Grieshaber, 2007), and neo-Vygotskian developments, provide researchers with other possibilities for understanding learning. In research terms, the concept of intervention (Vasquez, 2006) refers to the outside influences that researchers can observe or use to promote change. The concept of intervention in collaborative drawing allows for an acknowledgement of what outside influences might weave into the child’s imagery. Rogoff calls for the careful observance of ‘cultural tools’ (2003, p. 10) such as artworks, and the dialogues used by adults or older peers to teach and transform the young into more culturally aware inhabitants. Teachers can view the child as a diverse individual, albeit enculturated, and springboard drawing activities that tap into the child’s personal visual response to the world. Art/art The Western bias towards linguistic intelligences means that skills which utilise embodied practice and body intelligences tend to be denigrated (Cook, 1999; Wright, 2003). This could provide one explanation as to why some early childhood teachers can hold fairly structural beliefs about what Art/art is and how it should be taught in school. For instance, Art (with a capital ‘A’) is seen as a cultural, historical body of work, and/or art (small ‘a’) is seen as a practical, creative endeavour undertaken by an adult or child. Often these ideas act as potent pedagogy drivers, and fit with a preference for teacher-directed, product-oriented arts activities. When these persistent, historical approaches to early childhood pedagogies are interrupted, in this case through collaborative drawing, then ‘research with children rather than on children’ (Robbins, 2003b, p. 2) can emerge. Careful and considered observations can provide highly potent findings when looking at what children and adults draw, and the routines they may go through when drawing collaboratively. Observations may also help to understand how each participant views the research aims in such an exercise. Participants may possess different expectations of the role of drawing. For example, in addition to their differing views on their own drawing skills, adults particularly may also have strongly held opinions about the role of drawing and how it should be taught in the early childhood curriculum.
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Communication and Transformation through Collaboration Bourdieu’s theories on field and habitus are useful again here, for providing an explanation of why teachers might rely upon assumed practices (Bourdieu, 1993; Moore, 1999). Teachers’ values about drawing can sit within certain constructed contexts (e.g. they feel it is something children ‘do’ before learning literacy skills). A teacher’s constructed experience of Art/art may be based upon their own personal school encounters. This constructed experience can help to perpetuate their position, despite other evidence/literature/knowledge/training that suggests that there are other/better approaches to teaching art. If teachers are to change what they consider tried and true strategies, they will first have to understand their predetermined assumptions or structures around teaching, and be able to examine their practices. It is not a simple matter, however, to break down well-established pedagogical patterns (Moore, 1999), even though Bourdieu’s theories help to make some sense of the complex issues surrounding drawing activities in early childhood education. There are ‘struggles between intellectual and practical understandings’ (Cook, 1999, p. 294) of what is understood as ‘best practice’. For many educators, the opportunities to adjust their approaches to teaching are often restricted by the habitus of the more powerful and often conservative cultural field and capital of the school and its stakeholders. This issue is further compounded because habitus is typically invisible, beyond the reach of consciousness (Bourdieu, 1988, 1993). So what we do is also carried out unconsciously (Moore, 1999). It is no wonder that teachers, who have already encountered teaching first hand as school students, become school teachers with well-formed ideas of what a teacher is. Without opportunities for communication and collaboration to occur it is more difficult for individuals to travel to a new teaching field, and readjust some of the homogenised teaching and learning practices that are so deeply embedded there. Reflexivity To begin to understand the complex histories behind interactions between adults and children in early childhood education, and in the construction of drawing activities in particular, one needs to be aware of the presence of numerous fields and the respective habiti in action, including one’s own. Trends in postmodern research practices enable the researcher to write from constantly changing positions, via different associative ‘texts’. The researcher is seen as a ‘juggler playing with many balls’ (Grbich, 2004, p. 68). As I consider my own research practices I am aware I inhabit the fields of drawer, teacher, participant, observer, researcher, and use the various ‘texts’ related to them in various investigative and disseminatory ways. Although inevitably I bring my own field and habitus to my research, through awareness of my own cultural identities, I can explore how they each impact upon the research I conduct in terms of intended goals, and interpreting data. I can consider how I move between each of my roles (Grbich, 2004) to build up my knowledge of collaborative drawing practices in early childhood education. Bodily Practice The importance of understanding the habitus of ‘bodily practice’ (Cook, 1999, p. 295) adds another dimension to the inquiry into culturally developed behaviour (Bourdieu, 1993). The way young children might physically conduct themself when drawing, can demonstrate how conceptual and physical responses work in partnership and inform each other. As a word of caution, ‘A bodily practice like art must not be judged by standards inappropriate to its nature’ (Cook, 1999, p. 295, original emphasis). It is important when examining collaborative drawing, then, to not only establish the pedagogical benefits of the activity, but to promote the importance of understanding bodily practice. Despite the paradigmatic alliance of this article, I am interested in the concept of revisiting learning through bodily practice, although not from artist to artist but from child to adult. Children have an extraordinary ability to express themselves simultaneously through physical, verbal and expressive ways (for more on this, see Wright, 2007). If adults are able to closely observe the child, and re-educate themselves about their own expressive behaviours, the adult may begin to understand how to undertake effective collaborative drawing. This form of ‘bodily practice’
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Linda Knight learning transforms early childhood pedagogy, through allowing the adult to gain much closer insights, and enter into a child’s cultural field. This experience transforms what early childhood educators understand about children’s drawing, and may help them to re-examine their prior positions on the role of drawing in education. Rotational Exchange of Leadership Despite the extensive amount of research that utilises drawing, there is a clear need for ‘further research into educational art intervention’ (Rostan, 2006, p. 248). Rogoff’s (1990) studies into guided participation demonstrate the importance of exploring how adults and children engage in two-way communication exchange. Her examinations of the complex nature of group relationships and learning (Rogoff et al, 1993) provide important conceptual springboards from which the dominant pedagogical discourses can be expanded and challenged. It is essential that, alongside our continuing reforms into other areas of teaching and learning, we also give serious consideration to how we can address children’s creative development, particularly in early childhood. Children’s cultural fields are directly and indirectly developed and directed by adults, including caregivers and adult educators. Adults essentially play a hugely influential role in the enculturation and education of every child (Cole, 2005). But children also shape their own cultures. A rotational exchange of leadership between the adult and the child enables a revisiting, by both of them, of the embedded pedagogical scripts that teachers perpetuate and children quickly learn. In the context of these collaborative drawing episodes, rotational exchange of leadership enables children and adults to actively manage, through a series of alternating periods, the direction of a drawing exercise, resulting in the production of one collaborative drawing. The child is able to determine how the drawing should progress for a period, either through demonstrated action or instructional dialogue. The leadership is then exchanged and the adult can determine, again through demonstrated action or dialogue, how the drawing might progress. The periods of leadership are not fixed and the system of rotation is mutable. Each drawing collaboration is determined by the participants involved and the particular aims and socio-cultural contexts in play. In other research projects undertaken by Palinscar & Brown (cited in Palinscar, 2005), teachers were ‘urged to cede control’ (p. 287) of the direction of the instruction. A collaborative inquiry model presented by Bray et al (2000) ‘rests on an evolving paradigm of inquiry that celebrates participation’ (p. 3). These concepts of participation demonstrate how collaborations uncover powerful understandings of the ways in which teachers and students navigate the school field in relation to their own fields and habiti. Through the sharing of leadership of the activity with the child, we can come to some powerful understandings about teaching and learning, and reexamine pedagogical control, expectation, response, and direction. Conclusion This article is presented in the context of Australian early childhood educational and care, and the current dominant pedagogical discourses. It has explored theoretical and methodological relationships between socio-cultural and reflexive approaches to learning, to help foreground collaborative approaches to teaching and learning. There is currently a growing positional shift from the teacher as the sole repository of knowledge, to a position that acknowledges individual and cultural identity. According to Brooks (2004), ‘when the responsibility for learning is shifted from the teacher, and shared among the whole class group, this provides a richer and more dialogic learning environment’ (p. 48). I examine collaborative drawing as an event to illustrate how Bourdieu’s theories can provide a complementary investigative extension of Vygotskian ideas of apprenticeship. These discussions provide a depth of meaning to how learning may travel in two directions: the child can act as a source of knowledge to the adult. Ideally, one aim of education is to encourage and provide strategies for critical thought and action, in both adult and child. One way to achieve this aim successfully, in theory and in practice, is through collaborative drawing.
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Communication and Transformation through Collaboration Collaborative drawing allows adults to revisit their own expressive behaviours, by engaging in close observation of the multimodal, bodily practices of the children with whom they draw. It is hoped that this re-reading of arts pedagogy raises the profile of drawing in the curriculum, and brings drawing from the periphery of learning to the centre. Drawing can act as a core medium, through which teachers and children can explore key concepts and ideas. References Beghetto, R.A. & Plucker, J.A. (2006) The Relationship among Schooling, Learning, and Creativity: ‘all roads lead to creativity’ or ‘you can’t get there from here’, in J.C. Kaufman & J. Baer (Eds) Creativity and Reason in Cognitive Development. New York: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste, translated by R. Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Originally published in 1979 by Les Editions de Minuit, Paris, as La Distinction: Critique sociale do jugement. Bourdieu, P. (1988) The Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 46(3), 201-210. Bourdieu, P. (1993) The Field of Cultural Production: essays on art and literature, R. Johnson (Ed.). Cambridge: Polity Press. Bray, J.N., Lee, J., Smith, L.L. & Yorks, L. (2000) Collaborative Inquiry in Practice: action, reflection, and meaning making. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Brooks, M. (2004) Drawing: the social construction of knowledge, Australian Journal of Early Childhood, 29(2), 41-49. Cole, D. (2005) Putting Culture in the Middle, in H. Daniels (Ed.) An Introduction to Vygotsky (2nd edn). Hove: Routledge. Cook, R. (1999) Towards a Sociosomatics of Art: Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology, contemporary art and education, in M. Grenfell & M. Kelly (Eds) Pierre Bourdieu: language, culture and education. Berne: Peter Lang. Edwards, S. (2005) Constructivism Does Not Only Happen in the Individual: sociocultural theory and early childhood education, Early Child Development and Care, 175(1), 37-47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0300443042000230311 Grbich, C. (2004) New Approaches in Social Research. London: Sage. Grieshaber, S. (2007) Never Certain: research predicaments in the everyday world of schools, in A. Hatch (Ed.) Early Childhood Qualitative Research. New York: Routledge. Harper, D. (1998a) An Argument for Visual Sociology, in J. Prosser (Ed.) Image-based Research: a sourcebook for qualitative researchers. London: Falmer Press. Harper, D. (1998b) On the Authority of the Image: visual methods at the crossroads, in N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds) Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative Materials. London: Sage. Kilderry, A., Nolan, A. & Noble, K. (2004) Multiple Ways of Knowing and Seeing, Australian Journal of Early Childhood, 29(2), 24-28. Mac Naughton, G., Smith, K. & Davis, K. (2007) Researching with Children: the challenges and possibilities for building ‘child friendly’ research, in A. Hatch (Ed.) Early Childhood Qualitative Research. New York: Routledge. Matthews, J. (1999) The Art of Childhood and Adolescence: the construction of meaning. London: Falmer Press. McNamara, D. (2003) Learning through Sketching, in A. Clarke & G. Erickson (Eds) Teacher Inquiry: living the research in everyday practice. London: RoutledgeFalmer. McNaughton, K. & Krentz, C. (2007) The Construction Site Project: transforming early childhood teacher practice, Theory into Practice, 46(1), 65-73. Moore, A. (1999) Unmixing Messages: a Bourdieusian approach to tensions and helping-strategies in initial teacher education, in M. Grenfell & M. Kelly (Eds) Pierre Bourdieu: language, culture and education. Berne: Peter Lang. Palinscar, A.S. (2005) Social Constructivist Perspectives on Teaching and Learning, in H. Daniels (Ed.) An Introduction to Vygotsky (2nd edn). Hove: Routledge. Pink, S. (2001) Doing Visual Ethnography: images, media and representation in research. London: Sage.
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Linda Knight Ring, K. (2006) What Mothers Do: everyday routines and rituals and their impact upon young children’s use of drawing for meaning making, International Journal of Early Years Education, 14(1), 63-84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09669760500446416 Robbins, J. (2003a) Moving through Understanding Rather than to Understanding: a sociocultural perspective on young children’s conceptions of the rain, Journal of Australian Research in Early Childhood Education, 10(1), 93-108. Robbins, J. (2003b) The More He Looked Inside the More Piglet Wasn’t There: what adopting a sociocultural perspective can help us see, Australian Journal of Early Childhood, 26(2), 1-7. Rogoff, B. (1990) Apprenticeship in Thinking: cognitive development in social context. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rogoff, B. (2003) The Cultural Nature of Human Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rogoff, B., Mistry, J., Göncü, A. & Mosier, C. (1993) Guided Participation in Cultural Activity by Toddlers and Caregivers, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 58(8), 1-183. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1166109 Rostan, S.M. (2006) A Young Artist’s Story: advancing knowledge and the development of artistic talent and creativity in children, in J.C. Kaufman & J. Baer (Eds) Creativity and Reason in Cognitive Development. New York: Cambridge University Press. Vasquez, O.A. (2006) Cross-national Explorations of Sociocultural Research on Learning, Review of Research in Education, 30(1), 33-64. http://dx.doi.org/10.3102/0091732X030001033 Vygotsky, L.S. (1978) Mind in Society: the development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wright, S. (2003) Ways of Knowing in the Arts, in S. Wright (Ed.) Children, Meaning-making and the Arts. Frenchs Forest, NSW: Pearson Education Australia. Wright, S. (2007) Young Children’s Meaning-making through Drawing and ‘Telling’, Australian Journal of Early Childhood, 32(4), 22-30.
LINDA KNIGHT is a Senior Lecturer in Arts Education at the University of Canberra, Australia. A researcher and visual arts practitioner, Linda specialises in practice-led research methodologies, philosophies and theories of early childhood education, and drawing practices. One of her key research concerns involves exploring intergenerational collaborative drawing in early childhood education contexts as an aid to learning across the curriculum. Correspondence: Dr Linda Knight, Faculty of Education, University of Canberra, Kirinari Street, Bruce, ACT 2601, Australia (
[email protected]).
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