Games 7_journal article_Drawing Out Ideas- Graphicacy and Young Children

Drawing Out Ideas: Graphicacy and Young Children ANGELA ANNING

School of Education, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK

ABSTRACT: Drawing offers a powerful mode for representing and clarifying one’s own thinking and for communicating ideas to others. Young children instinctively use drawing in the same exploratory way that designers use sketching to ‘converse with themselves’when generating ideas. The two distinctive traditions of drawing in Technology and Fine Art are replicated in the Design and Technology and Art and Design curricula in England and Wales. However, because we lack research evidence about (i) the processes by which children develop drawing capability and (ii) the effects of school culture and pedagogy on the development of children’s drawing capability, teachers are confused about how to teach drawing and unsure about the role of graphicacy in promoting children’s learning in both subjects. In this article the particular dilemmas of teaching design drawing to young children will be discussed. A research agenda for the teaching and learning of drawing in primary schools will be outlined.

Keywords:drawing, designing, young children, technology education.

Drawing is seen as a skill for all children to acquire at a basic level. The assumption is that only those with a special talent for drawing will develop beyond this level. Amongst adults drawing is perceived as the preserve of artists or specialist workers; but in fact drawing has traditionally served the function of recording personally or culturally significant images in domestic or spiritual/religious contexts for everyone. In the world of work drawing has been used as a tool for thinking – to envision artefacts or structures, to formulate or record plans or to communicate intentions to co-workers. Artists also use drawing as a vehicle for rehearsing or clarifying ideas for the production of two or three dimensional work, or to explore ideas and feelings. For artists, drawings may also be presented as artistic statements in their own right, not necessarily serving any function other than aesthetic.

In asking children to draw in educational contexts we derive practices from this diversity of socio-cultural and artistic traditions. However, many teachers are only vaguely aware of the complexity of these traditions. For them drawing is a minor mode of communication, certainly secondary to writing and speech, in education. They are unaware of the power of graphicacy as a tool for learning and for recording thinking in classrooms.They are also uncertain about the appropriateness of genres of drawing for different purposes and therefore unable to give clear guidance to pupils.Indeed in many classrooms drawing is more likely to be caught than taught.In primary schools in England this conceptual confusion has been high-lighted by the parallel but distinct emphases on drawing within the National Curriculum Design and Technology and Art Orders. The requirements in International Journal of Technology and Design Education 7: 219–239, 1997.?1997 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

220ANGELA ANNING

the Design and Technology Order (DFE/WO, 1995) are for children to progress from ‘making freehand drawings’ for designing at Key Stage One (for 5- to 7-year-olds) to ‘communicating aspects of their design pro-posals by modelling their ideas in a variety of ways’ at Key Stage Two (for 7- to 11-year-olds). In the Art Order (DFE, 1995) the programme of study for Key Stage One specifies that pupils should be taught to ‘record what has been experienced, observed and imagined’ and ‘experiment with tools and techniques for drawing’ and, at Key Stage Two, ‘develop skills for recording from direct experience and imagination and select and record from first-hand observation’, ‘record observations and ideas and collect visual evidence and information, using a sketchbook’ and ‘experiment with and develop control of tools and techniques for drawing’.

In Design and Technology, the genesis of drawing traditions and genres is the training and working practices of the professional designer or skilled artisan: sketches, charts, diagrams, mathematical symbols, annotated and orthographic drawings. The genesis of drawing in Art is the Western European tradition of Fine Art: still lifes, life drawing, portraiture, prepara-tory drafts for town and landscapes and for religious and heroic scenes. In both drawing traditions, the functions of line, texture, tone, shape and space are complementary but distinctive. Design drawings use line and texture to describe intended outcomes, but the conventions of representing light and space in the search for realism within Fine Art conventions put an emphasis also on the use of tone and formal devices to represent per-spective and scale.

Within the secondary school curriculum these two traditions are divided between those responsible for delivering the Art and Design and the Design and Technology curricula. Pupils are socialised into working within the modes of graphicacy each discipline demands of them. Some pupils (par-ticularly girls) may linger inappropriately in a decorative/artistic mode of drawing in their work for technology projects. For generalist primary teachers responsible for delivering all the National Curriculum subjects in their classrooms, distinctions about approaches to drawing are rarely made explicit in their classrooms. Training at initial or in-service level is unlikely to have helped them to understand the nature and mechanics of different modes of graphicacy. It is understandable therefore that they are confused about how to approach the teaching of drawing and unsure about the role of graphicacy in promoting children’s learning.

This article will attempt to tease out some of these confusions and argue that young children in our education system are deterred from using graphicacy as a potentially powerful tool for thinking and learning because of the conceptual and pedagogic uncertainties about drawing in school contexts. The particular dilemmas of teaching design drawing to young children will be discussed. Finally a research agenda for the teaching and learning of drawing in primary schools will be outlined.

DRAWING OUT IDEAS221 DRAWING IN DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY

The power and significance of the ‘non-verbal language’ of technology have been defined for those unfamiliar with its codes and traditions by Baynes and Pugh (1981) and Ferguson (1993). Kimbell, Stables and Green (1996) define a key principle:

Workshop manuals are full of diagrams, drawings and photographs not because the users cannot read, but because the language of images is so much richer than the language of words when one has to deal in technological matters. (ibid, p. 23)

As Ferguson points out, for engineers drawing involves two related but separate processes. Initially the use of quick sketches, rough calculations and intuitive scribbling of forms and shapes helps engineering designers to translate emergent images in the mind’s eye into tangible forms. The very act of drawing helps to clarify their understanding of the dimensions of the engineering problem, determine how they might set about resolving them and to bring tentative solutions to the surface of the mind. This exploratory style of drawing is usually a private activity. Garner (1992) describes it as ‘conversing with yourself’. Its function is to help clarify the designer’s ideas for her/himself. One of the designers in Garner’s account of his research into how designers use drawing in their work explained that: As soon as you start drawing it (an idea in your mind) you realise how inadequate your mental image is. You think you’ve got it contained in your mind but as soon as you put it down on paper you recognise there are facets of it that you can’t really grasp just by thinking about it. So it is the first externalisation of an idea to test it. (p. 102) Exploratory sketching of ideas can also be used in the workplace to assist ‘collective cognition’ amongst a team of workers. Henderson (1990) describes the ‘visual culture’ of the world of design engineers in which drawings play a pivotal role.

Here, sketching and drawing are the basic components of communication; words are built around them, but the drawings are so central that people assembled in meetings wait while individuals fetch visual representations left in their offices or sketch facsimiles on white boards. Co-ordination and conflict take place over, on and through the drawings. These visual representations shape the structure of the work, who may participate in the work, and the final products of design engineering. They are a com-ponent of the social organization of collective cognition and the locus for practice-situated and practice-generated knowledge (p. 449).

Henderson’s research explored the impact of the introduction of computer aided design on the working practices of a group of engineers engaged in redesigning a turbine engine package. The functional immediacy of the traditional, ephemeral pencil sketches on scraps of paper were germane to the ‘conversations’ between members of the team. The introduction of CAD into their working environment required them to shape new working prac-tices. The flexibility of working with pencil and paper was lost as they struggled to devise alternative strategies for working with computers. Medway (1996) has described the way architects use multi-modal texts in

222ANGELA ANNING

the workplace – drawing, writing or CAD images (each predominating at critical phases of decision-making about designs) with speech and gesture – both to clarify their own thinking and to share ideas and problem solve with colleagues. My own observations of designers at work is that the pencil and pad are still used for the creative, fluid beginnings of developing ideas and computer software for technical decision making about dimensions, refining spatial relationships and so on. Designers move fluently from one mode to another depending on the nature of the nodal point of decision making or stage of generating ideas.

The limitations of software currently available for generating images from the mind’s eye – their essentially predictive qualities – detract from the pro-ductive immediacy of pencil and paper sketching. In sketching, boundaries of objects and structures are blurred, contour lines are omitted, scribbling and hatching are used to suggest possibilities. The vagueness enables the mind to retrieve from a bank of mental images new possibilities for inventing or creating novel solutions. Ironically, the drive to replicate these mental processes in order to produce commercially attractive software for designers is inspiring research into the nature of visual processing and representation (Fish & Scrivener, 1990).

A second set of drawings, with a quite distinct set of conventions, for-malises the design solution into technical drawings and specifications which inform those who will make or build the machine, structure, artefact or system, or convey design possibilities to a client or customer. Designers use these drawings to communicate with others rather than to converse with themselves. These drawings have features very specific to the professional context in which they are generated. The nature of architectural drawings is quite distinct from engineering drawings. Those learning to be profes-sionals are inducted into the drawing conventions of their chosen profession. The nature of these graphic mores perpetuates divisions of labour in the workplace – in architecture, for example, architects, draughtsmen/women, builders, site managers, skilled artisans, labourers – all of whose working practices are dependent on the design drawings. Nevertheless, Ferguson argues:

Although the drawings appear to be exact and unequivocal, their precision conceals many informed choices, inarticulate judgements, acts of intuition, and assumptions about the way the world works. The conversion of an idea to an artefact, which engages both the designer and maker, is a complex and subtle process that will always be far closer to art than to science (Ferguson, 1993, p. 3).

The recursive cycle from images generated in the mind’s eye to their expli-cation in speech, gesture, writing, models or drawings is the essence of designing. Kimbell et al. (1991) describe this as ‘the cornerstone of capa-bility in design and technology’.

DRAWING OUT IDEAS223 DRAWING IN ART

In Art, drawing has also been defined as ‘an activity central to all work’(DES, 1991: 3.20). There are parallels to the exploratory and communica-tive modes of design drawing within Fine Art traditions. Perry (1992) distinguishes between ‘creative’ and ‘representational’ drawings. Creative drawing serves the function of ‘exploring what drawing will do and what it will suggest to both perception and cognition’ (p. 91) It may remain a private activity which explores the potential of media or mark-making, or draws on images from the mind’s eye. The artist may subsequently decide to present such exploratory drawings for public consumption. The aesthetics of drawing are likely to be of paramount importance in the artist’s decision to go public with it. However, it may be that public interest in the processes and outcomes of a famous artist results in working drawings being exhib-ited and celebrated at a later date. The drawings of Leonardo da Vinci would be an example.

Artists use drawings to service other art disciplines; for example as a preparatory sketch for landscape or think piece for a non-figurative sculp-ture. It may be to illustrate an imaginative narrative as in book illustration; or to express intensely personal feelings, for example, recording responses to bereavement or a natural phenomena of great power or beauty where literal representation is subservient to line being used to express emotions. David Hockney, one of the great draughtsmen of our time, wrote: In learning to draw you learn to look. You teach yourself to see and to feel what you see. Drawing is a more interesting way than writing of passing on your feelings about the world you see because it is closer to what we actually feel. (quoted in Camp, 1981, p. 6)

The Basic Design courses in art colleges in the 1960s and ’70s, devel-oped from Bauhaus traditions, created a new orthodoxy for preparation for work in Fine Art and still inform the curriculum of the many regional art foundation courses in England and Wales. The courses were developed to free students up from classical, Fine Art traditions in education and through exercises in colour, pattern, form, texture, tone, line, space and shape, prepare them for the broader vocational demands of art, craft and design in the twentieth century. The discipline of learning how to draw became only one of several significant aspects of learning to be an artist.

In the Western European tradition of Fine Art, representational drawing came to be valued above all other genres, particularly through the revered traditions of life classes and copying from The Masters. Representational drawing serves the function of disciplining the artist in careful observa-tion of real life objects, phenomena, events, places or people and of training his or her hand/eyes co-ordination in translating a perceived image into a graphic outcome. As with the public versions of design drawing there are well-tried and tested conventions for representational drawing. Learning

224ANGELA ANNING

about tone and texture and the conventions of perspective are important features of learning to be a fine artist in Western Europe.

RESEARCH INTO THE TEACHING OF DRAWING TO YOUNG CHILDREN Inevitably, elements of the dual traditions in drawing education have filtered through to the education of young children. In the second half of the nine-teenth century elementary schools were set up to teach what was useful to the sons and daughters of the working classes (Curtis & Boultwood, 1962). Initially the function of the art curriculum, predominantly for boys, was to service the development of ‘Skill of Hand and Eye’ for a useful and productive workforce for industry. In state funded schools art lessons were for aspiring artisans. The loftier traditions of Fine Art were reserved for the children of wealthy families educated at home or in independent schools. In the elementary schools, art lessons consisted of routine exercises in learning how to draw 3D shapes, copying pictures from books or the blackboard, or formal, highly structured exercises in colour identification and patterning (Tomlinson, 1947). Nature study provided opportunities, as it still does, for observational studies of plants, animals, insects and natural phenomena. By the turn of the century drawing had become part of the general education for all children. In 1905 the official Suggestions for the Consideration of Teachers included a chapter on drawing. In the 1923 edition there was a statement that ‘drawing is just as natural to a child as speaking and writing, and ought to be as carefully treated.’ By 1927 the Board of Education asserted that there were three main points of view from which drawing in public elementary school could be regarded; first as a means of expression; second as a means of representation; and third as an instrument of culture. With regard to drawing as a means of expres-sion the Board stated that ‘drawing is primarily a language, a mode of expression, by which ideas, thoughts and feelings of one person may be graphically conveyed to another’ (Layton, 1996).

In the 1930s in Eastern Europe, Frank Cizek pioneered a movement which established Child Art as having an integrity in its own right distinct from the conventions of adult art. His ideas were disseminated in the UK by Marion Richardson whose handwriting patterns probably occupied happy hours during their primary schooling of many readers. The belief that pro-gression in art for children was a process of ‘natural unfolding’ held sway for the next forty years. Children were seen as natural artists (Lowenfeld & Brittain, 1970). Rhoda Kellogg (1969) wrote, ‘In terms of spontaneous art, every child is a “born artist” who should be allowed to scribble without oppressive guidance in art education’ (p. 266). Her influential study of a quarter of a million children’s drawings from forty nations produced a taxonomy of schemas – shapes like circles, squares, vertical and hori-zontal strokes – which children appear to explore whatever their cultural context. A romantic view of the purity of children’s art is still apparent in

many artists’ writing about drawing. For example, Picasso wrote ‘Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist as he grows up.Once I drew like Raphael, but it has taken me a whole lifetime to learn to draw like children.’

The Vygotskian perspective on the significance of the social context in which learning takes place has informed our understanding of how young children learn to draw. In the processes of absorbing the forms of cultur-ally significant mark-making, drawing and symbol systems surrounding them at home and school, children begin to turn scribbling into drawing and to separate writing from both (Vygotsky, 1978). The intervention and modelling of a more knowledgeable and technically competent other –parent, older brother or sister, teacher – can accelerate their acquisition of ways of representing meaning. Figure 1 is an example of a young child,Victoria, aged 4, drawing alongside her father. He wrote down her descrip-tion of her drawing as ‘a tiger in a cage’ in English, but also demonstrated some Chinese characters. She experimented with both types of print on the left hand side of her drawing. It is an example of a shared act of meaning making through graphicacy, for Victoria a form of apprenticeship into the graphicacy club. Research in Australia at La Trobe University in Melbourne by Dr Edith Bevin has demonstrated how aboriginal children can move fluently between the graphic conventions of Western style representational drawing and the distinctive symbolic systems of indigenous dreamtime drawings. Sometimes children combine elements of both systems into the

DRAWING OUT IDEAS 225

Figure 1

. Victoria (aged 4) and her father sharing drawing and writing.

226ANGELA ANNING

same drawing. (Recorded in Open University production, Windows on the Mind, 1995)

Many teachers are hesitant to intervene in this direct way into the processes of young children’s learning to draw. Strongly influenced by the Kellogg ideology, for them intervention is perceived as interference into children’s creativity. In the 1970s Elliott Eisner (1972) challenged this orthodoxy. He argued that development in children’s art ‘is not an auto-matic consequence of maturation but rather a process that is affected by the type of experience children have had and that a child’s ability is a function of what he has learned’ (p. 105). In the UK the authors of The Gulbenkian Report (Robinson et al., 1982) called for a radical reappraisal of pedagogy in the arts and a better understanding of the role of the teacher in ensuring that children progressed.

The task is not simply to let anything happen in the name of self-expression or creativity. Neither is it to impose rigid structures or ideas and methods upon the children.

The need is for a difficult balance of freedom and authority (ibid, p. 33).

In reality the research evidence is that primary teachers spend little time interacting with children when they are engaged in art (Tizard et al., 1988; Mortimore et al., 1988; Alexander, 1992) and there is evidence that art is rarely systematically taught.

Art activities were “used to extend or round off other work” (“Now do a picture”) and in this respect were sometimes little more than a time-filler. Moreover, some teachers con-sciously adopted the strategy of using art as an unsupervised activity which freed them to concentrate on groups undertaking mathematics and language tasks. (Alexander, 1992, p. 49)

The introduction of a National Curriculum Art Order for 5 to 11-year-olds in schools in England and Wales created opportunities for a more inter-ventionist, structured approach to art education. However, there is evidence that messy workshop or art areas are often still sited in ‘wet areas’ super-vised by non-teaching assistants and removed from the main area of the teacher’s routine supervision of clean and orderly seat-based work – a physical manifestation of the teacher’s actual rather than espoused cur-riculum priorities.

It is within this cultural and pedagogic context that drawing in primary schools happens. The messages children absorb from primary school pedagogy are that drawing is about representation of real objects (‘draw that bunch of daffodils’); a time filler to keep them harmlessly occupied (‘when you’ve finished your work do a picture’); or at best an opportunity to describe remembered or imagined narrative in graphic form (‘draw the animal you liked best in the urban farm’ or ‘draw an amazing monster’). They learn that getting better at drawing is a self-help zone and that it is not valued as a tool for clarifying their thinking or recording their ideas. The teacher will only pay cursory attention to their drawings however much effort they put into them.

DRAWING OUT IDEAS227 In contrast, in educational contexts where children’s drawing intentions are valued and their graphicacy is nurtured by instruction and supported by feedback from adults, drawing offers children a powerful tool for making sense of the world. In Reggio Emilia in Italy an early education interven-tion programme (Malaguzzi, 1987) involves practising artists working in ateliers alongside children and their teachers in Pre-school Centres. An atelier is ‘a place for manipulating or experimenting with separated or combined visual languages either in isolation or in combination with the verbal ones’ (Edwards et al., 1993, p. 56). Like Howard Gardner (1993) Malaguzzi, the chief architect of the intervention programme, believes that conventional schooling overestimates young children academically whilst underestimating them intellectually. In the ateliers children are encouraged to develop their intellectual powers through various modes of symbolic representation – role play, recorded talk, numbers and letters, signs and symbols, drawing, manipulating photocopies of icons – and graphicacy is given high status. Recording ideas in graphic mode is not seen as a one-off process. Children are encouraged to revisit recorded work again and again to develop and reformulate ideas. The children’s levels of drawing competence are startling. There is also evidence of remark-able achievement in the drawings of Chinese children (Winner, 1989), though these are gained through strong direction and authoritarian styles of teaching that would sit uneasily in traditions of early childhood educa-tion in Europe.

There has been little research in the UK into the effects of pedagogy on young children’s capabilities in drawing. An exception is research by Cox, Eames and Cooke (1994) into the effectiveness of a ten session drawing programme for 5- to 7-year-olds. The approach – defined as a ‘negotiated drawing’ experience – guided children through drawing ordinary but dif-ficult objects by talk and adult demonstration. The guidance was offered in the context of a shared experience – for example, cooking eggs. The results showed modest improvements in standards of drawing in three drawing tasks administered pre and post intervention (drawing a telephone, brushing your teeth, a strange zoo) in the children who had experienced the ‘negotiated drawing’ approach.

RESEARCH INTO THE DEVELOPMENT OF DRAWING CAPABILITY

Most of the research into young children’s experiments with mark making has been carried out by psychologists working in laboratory conditions or tracking individual children (often their own) at home or by practising artists – again often tracking the progress of their own children. There has been little systematic research into the processes of making meaning through graphicacy in the context of classrooms. Psychologists, artists and educa-tors have brought their own agenda to the research. Psychologists have focused on the insights drawings give into children’s cognition or percep-

228ANGELA ANNING

tual/motor functions. Those with an interest in the therapeutic aspects of drawing have used them as a way of trying to access children’s emotional states. Artists have concentrated on the meaning making or aesthetic aspects of children’s drawings. Educators have been concerned with the stages of development of children drawing – in particular the way in which they develop the technical aspects of representation and symbol acquisition.

Initially young children produce chance formations of marks (see the pioneering study by Luquet (1927) of his own child’s drawing development); then with increasing control of both tools and their own manipulative skills explore schemas – repeatable symbols such as circles, vertical or hori-zontal lines, mandalas etc (Kellogg, 1969); then use drawing in a very personal way to make sense of the world (Matthews, 1994). Their drawings may involve proto-visual talking and acting. Some of the marks represent not objects but movements, sounds and feelings – a visual representation of dramatic play. These ‘playful’ but intentional drawings are a replica-tion of the sketching behaviour of designers described by Baynes and Pugh (1981) and Ferguson (1993) which provides a vehicle for them to talk through ideas with themselves and with others. Garner (1992) reports that designers often use the word ‘play’ (though it may be apologetically) when they are describing parallel aspects of the design process.

Figure 2 demonstrates how Dale, aged 4, used marks to symbolise both his spatial understanding in representing the geography of the walk and his feelings about walking – or in sections running and skipping – to school.

Figure 2. Dale (aged 4) uses marks to symbolise both the geography and his feelings about his journey to school.

His teacher recorded his commentary afterwards. Matthews points out that scant attention has been paid by psychologists to this important level of representation and expression in young children, just as Garner points our how little research has been carried out on this aspect of designerly behaviour. Instead, research has focused the way in which children gain competence in representing what they know and see with increasing accuracy. In their early attempts to represent people, places and objects,children draw what they know, a codified version of what they see. Figure 3 shows a 5-year-old boy’s drawing of what matters to him about his house in York. There is a hidden alleyway round the back of the house allowing access for his father’s truck and trailer; there are mice in the attic; and the classic representational dilemma of drawing a vertical chimney stack on a sloping roof has been resolved by turning the pot at forty five degree angle to the stack. It is because Toby sees what he does that he is driven to represent what he knows so precisely. Berger (1972) reminds us that ‘Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognises before it can speak. But there is another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world’(p. 23).

As they experiment with recording what they see, children struggle with the technical problems of representing occlusion and perspective.Cox (1991; 1992) described controlled laboratory based experiments where she attempted to get young children to draw objects behind objects and to represent depth in drawing structures and places. Her studies indicated that if asked to draw two objects, one of which was behind the other,children up to the age of about eight will draw them separately. They are representing what they see and know – that is that there are two objects

DRAWING OUT IDEAS 229

Figure 3

. Toby (aged 5) represents what is important to him about his house.

on the table – rather than what they can literally see. Willats (1995) has demonstrated that if occluded objects are shown to children in a narrative framework in which the hidden sections make sense to them (for example part of a person hiding behind a wall) they are capable of representing this occlusion in drawings. His research offers a rare example of a psy-chologist attempting to reconcile the complex interplay of meaning making and technical competence in children’s development of drawing capabili-ties. In tasks involving drawing straight line objects in perspective, children up to the age of nine used vertical oblique projection. In drawing a cube,children up to the age of seven tended to draw a square or a ‘folded-out’version, a configuration made up of a number of rectangles. In general young children found it difficult to draw oblique lines and acute angles in repre-senting solid shapes or structures.

Children’s invented solutions to the technical problems of representing the three dimensional world in two dimensional drawings are endlessly inventive (Willats, 1977; Freeman, 1980). Figure 4 shows a 7-year-old child’s attempt to represent a mathematics lesson in her North Yorkshire classroom. Objects on tables and shelves have been represented side by side,but she has used remarkable strategies to draw the children standing behind the weighing table – variations in the size of the figures to represent depth and occlusion of the figure behind the bucket balance – and to represent the front, back and side views of children seated at the table.

From the earliest stages of drawing, children can demonstrate remark-able powers of accurate representation of what they have seen and learned.Figure 5 is a drawing by 4-year-old Jamie-Jo of how a tap works. He had

230ANGELA ANNING

Figure 4

. A 7 year old girl’s drawing of a mathematics lesson.

helped his father to renovate the bathroom. Figure 6 is a record of how a 7-year-old Doncaster school child recorded her understanding of bone struc-tures, glancing occasionally at a plastic model skeleton on the other side of the classroom for information to confirm what she knew.

Drawings are as rich a source of evidence as language, a window on the thinking of children in all areas of the curriculum. It is depressing that they are accorded so little value in a school system dominated by writing as the premium mode of representation and by the dominance of verbal and neglect of graphic fluency as something for which to aim.

TEACHING DRAWING FOR DESIGNING TO YOUNG CHILDREN

Given primary teachers’ inadequate understanding of the purposes and genres of drawing, it is not surprising that drawing episodes in design and technology activities are problematic. Children are not introduced to the genres of drawing that can help them to develop designerly thinking and behaviours – sketch pads, notebooks, annotated drawings, story-boards,orthographic drawings, architectural or engineering drawings from the world of work, CAD designs. (Surprisingly it is only at Key Stage Three (for 11- to 15-year-olds) that the Technology Order specifies the use of infor-mation technology for designing)

DRAWING OUT IDEAS 231

Figure 5. Jamie-Jo (aged 4) did a drawing of how a tap

works.Figure 6. A drawing of a skeleton by a 7 year old.

232

ANGELA ANNING

Lacking models of the conventions and purposes of design drawings –for example the distinction between the private, exploratory and public, communicative modes of representation in designing – teachers simply instruct children to ‘draw a design’. With no guidance as to how to set about this, children respond by drawing the only way they know how to – the catch-all drawing styles they have developed unsupervised in art lessons or to service topic and story writing exercises.

Children need to be offered examples of what design drawings look like. Simplified annotated drawings or exploded diagrams (see Figure 7) pinned up on workshop notice boards provide models for children of how to work towards styles of technical drawing which help them to plan and record their designerly thinking. It may also be useful to include in the resources for technology examples of the kinds of sketches made by great technologists – those by Leonardo da Vinci, Brunel and Edison are obvious examples. Garner (1992) points out that it is useful to offer children examples of contemporary designers’ working drawings.

An additional problem is that children are not cued by teachers to think

about materials before they start their design drawings; but it is only possible

DRAWING OUT IDEAS233 to design effectively when you know the materials you will be using and have an understanding of their qualities. Nor are children asked to indicate fixing and joining devices or mechanisms when drawing a design. The results are that when children enter the making stage of the task, their drawings serve little purpose as useful reference points and are quickly discarded. Physical, made outcomes rarely look much like the children’s original drawings – except perhaps for surface, decorative features. How could they, given the unfocused manner in which the design drawings were produced?

It is also important to remind ourselves of the research evidence on the technical limitations of children’s ability to represent 3D shapes in 2D drawings cited earlier in the article. Constraints on their ability to repre-sent overlap, acute angles, oblique lines, spatial relationships and scale must inevitably dictate the type of design drawings we can reasonably expect children to produce at the ages of five, seven, nine and eleven. Often in design and technology activities young children are being asked to draw at an inappropriate level.

It may be unrealistic to expect a young child to draw a design before pro-ducing an outcome at all. There is research evidence that in construction play with wooden blocks it is at about nine years of age that children can represent their design intentions for a construction accurately in a drawing (Banta, 1980). Gura (1991) demonstrated that young children were more productively encouraged to represent their models in drawings after they have made them and had experience of the materials. At least that way round the drawings were made with an understanding of the properties and dimen-sions of the materials used for the models. Figure 8 illustrates an activity for 4- and 5-year-olds in their first year at school . The children were encour-aged to experiment practically with as many different ways as they could think of to fasten spikes to a card outline of a sea monster. Figure 9 shows a child’s annotated drawings which recorded the various techniques they used. Figure 10 shows a 5-year-old child’s exploded diagram of her model vehicle drawn after she had made the model. The text she added reads,‘We used wood and we stuck them with triangles and we used tops for wheels and put on an axle and a cardboard box.’

Another supportive strategy used by teachers is to set young children the task of sketching everyday objects from different viewpoints. Figure

11 shows quick sketches drawn by 6-year-olds of a teddy bear and Figure

12 of a hammer. Such activities help children to develop confidence in using sketches and in using line to represent three dimensional objects in two dimensional form. ‘Scribbling’ down ideas becomes dissociated from the forbidden acts of scribbling in books of school culture. The natural fluency exhibited by young children, not yet afraid of making mistakes, is the equiv-alent of the use of line to converse with yourself that designers have to work so hard to rediscover.

A further important but poorly researched area of designing is the rela-tionship between modelling with three dimensional materials and their

234ANGELA ANNING

Figure 8. 4 and 5 year olds experiment with fixing card spikes to a sea monster’s back.

Figure 9. A child’s sketch of the ways they fixed the spikes to the monster.

DRAWING OUT IDEAS235

Figure 10. A 5 year old girl’s model and her draw and written descriptions of how it was made.

two dimensional representations. Designers use three dimensional models at a stage beyond two dimensional sketching both to get a tangible sense of what a structure or artefact will look like and how it might work. For young children whose experience of the world is based on direct exploration of the physical three dimensional world, it may be a more natural pro-gression to explore and experiment with spatial relationships and moving and fixing parts of a design in three dimensional models as the first stage of designing rather than to manipulate images on paper or screen. DRAWING AND YOUNG CHILDREN’S LEARNING : A RESEARCH AGENDA

Children enter formal schooling with a wide range of strategies for making sense of the world. Interactions in classrooms focus around aural learning and encouraging children to acquire and practise symbol systems associated with literacy and numeracy. This narrowness limits children’s potential to make progress in graphicacy or model making and disadvantages children

with a preference for visual and kinesthetic learning styles (Gardner, 1991).Medway’s (1995) observations of architects at work record them moving constantly from sketches to formal technical drawings, from pencil to mouse, from phone-call to note-pad, from gesture to writing. Schools simply do not offer this kind of flexibility of movement from one mode or enquiry and representation to another. Nor incidentally do Higher Education Institutions offer this flexibility to students. Sadly, at the very beginning of their education, children’s natural inclination to use drawing as one of a range of modes of thinking and learning simply withers away. Friere (1971) drew attention to parallel limitations in the kind of literacy that dominates the school curriculum. In essence he argues that we teach ‘letteracy’ (reading the word) rather than literacies (reading the world),the latter drawing on ways of knowing such as picture-making, storying,music-making and movement.

It is recognised that the acquisition of language in young children is a process which begins in the context of sounds received before birth and manifests itself in the babbling of infants. These sounds have meaning for both the children and for those with whom they interact. They ways in which the child’s first words emerge from the dynamics of making meaning for themselves, communicating with others and learning the social linguistic conventions of the milieu in which they are using language, including the rather specialised conventions of school talk, have been well researched.Recognition of the parallel significance and potential of mark-making has been slow to emerge. There is a need for research into the development of graphicacy at home and in educational contexts. The kinds of research questions we need to address are:

236ANGELA ANNING

Figure 11. A teddy bear drawn from different

viewpoints by a 6 year old.Figure 12. A hammer from different viewpoints by a 6 year old.

DRAWING OUT IDEAS237?do the processes of drawing help children to make sense of the world?

?how do children of different ages reconcile the limitations of their ability to draw what they see with the need to represent what they know??how does the physical/motor development of children affect their drawing capability?

?how do children develop the capacity to visualise/think in three dimen-sions?

?does access to information technology affect children’s drawing capa-bilities?

There is also a need for a research agenda into the teaching of drawing in schools including such questions as:

?does the culture of drawing in school settings enhance or retard children’s drawing capabilities?

?do the features of adult/child interactions surrounding drawing episodes affect children’s drawing behaviours?

?do teachers develop theories about children’s drawing and what are those theories?

?do the theories affect the way teachers teach drawing?

?can the potential for children learning how to draw and learning through drawing be developed in the educational system?

?can information technology be used to enhance or support the develop-ment of children’s drawing capabilities?

Drawings and the processes by which they are made give us a window on children’s cognitive processing which can be as informative as studying their language. It is time teachers and researchers paid them proper atten-tion. It seems self-evident that teaching young children drawing can improve their confidence and competence in graphicacy but teachers need to be trained to understand the value of graphicacy for learning and the processes by which children make progress in drawing. They need a knowledge base of the distinctive genres of drawing in art and design so that they can introduce children to them and guide them in their choice of the mode of representation most appropriate for particular tasks. Finally they need support in learning strategies for teaching the skills and techniques common to all drawing capability, whilst remaining sensitive to children’s personal voyages of discovery through graphicacy and so leave them space to develop their own individual styles. The research agenda outlined above would give teachers and children a framework within which drawing could be recognised and developed as a significant mode of learning.

With thanks to colleagues David Layton, Edgar Jenkins and Pete Medway for comments on an earlier draft and to Jane Holmes, Elaine Moreton, Diane Pyatt and Jane Richards for access to drawings.

238ANGELA ANNING

REFERENCES

Alexander, R. J.: 1992, Policy and Practice in Primary Education, Routledge, London. Banta, M. A.: 1980, Unit Blocks: A Curriculum for Early Learning, The Early Childhood Learning Centre, Department of Early Childhood Education, University of the District of Columbia, New York: ERIC Doc 206401.

Baynes, K. & Pugh, F.: 1981, The Art of the Engineer, Lutterworth Press, Cambridge. Berger, J.: 1972, Ways of Seeing, Penguin, Harmondsworth.

Camp, J.: 1984, Draw: How to Master the Art, Andre Deutsch, London.

Cox, M.: 1992, Children’s Drawings, Penguin, Harmondsworth.

Cox, M.: 1991, The Child’s Point of View, Harvester, Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead. Cox, M. V., Eames, K. & Cooke, G.: 1994, ‘The Teaching of Drawing in the Infants School: An Evaluation of the ‘Negotiated Drawing’ Approach’, International Journal of Early Years Education2(3), 68–83.

Curtis, J. & Boultwood, M. E. A.: 1962, An Introductory History of English Education since 1800, Second Edition, University Tutorial Press, London.

DES: 1991, Art for Ages 5–14. National Curriculum Proposals, HMSO, London.

DFE/WO: 1995, Design and Technology in the National Curriculum, HMSO, London. DFE: 1995, Art in the National Curriculum, HMSO, London.

Edwards, C., Gandini, L. & Forman, G. (eds.): 1993, The Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Approach to Early Childhood Education, Ablex Publishing Company, Norwood, New Jersey.

Eisner, E.: 1972, Educating Artistic Vision, Collier Macmillan, New York.

Ferguson, E. S.: 1993, Engineering and the Mind’s Eye, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Masachusetts.

Fish, J. & Scrivener, S.: 1990, ‘Amplifying the Mind’s Eye: Sketching and Visual Cognition’, Leonardo23(1), 117–126.

Freeman, N. H.: 1980, Strategies of Representation in Young Children, Academic Press, London.

Friere, P.: 1971, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Seabury Press, New York.

Gardner, H.: 1993, Frames of Mind. The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, Second Edition, Fontana Press, London.

Gardner, H.: 1993, The Unschooled Mind. How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach, Fontana Press, London.

Garner, S.: 1992, ‘The Undervalued Role of Drawing in Design’, in D. Thistlewood (ed.), Drawing: Research and Development, Longman in Association with the National Society for Education in Art and Design, Harlow.

Gura, P.: 1992, Explaining Learning. Young Children and Block Play, Paul Chapman Publishing, London.

Henderson, K: 1991, ‘Flexible Sketches and Inflexible Data Bases: Visual Communication, Conscription Devices and Boundary Objects’, Design Engineering Science, Technology and Human Values16(4), 448–473.

Kellogg, R.: 1969, Analyzing Children’s Art, National Press Books, Palo Alto, California. Kimbell, R., Stables, K. & Green, R.: 1996, Understanding Practice in Design and Technology, Open University Press, Buckingham.

Kimbell, R., Stables, K., Wheeler, T., Wozniak, A. & Kelly, V.: 1991, The Assessment of Performance in Design and Technology: The Final Report of the Design and Technology APU Project, Evaluation and Monitoring Unit: Schools Examination and Assessment Council, London.

Layton, D.: 1996, Unpublished letter to the author.

Lowenfeld, V. & Brittain, W. L.: 1987, Creative and Mental Growth, Macmillan New York. Luquet, G. H.: 1927, Le Dessin Enfantin, Paris. Alcan Luquet defined three stages in the development of drawing up to the ages of 7 or 8 – pre-representational, intellectual realism and visual realism.