Learning to Draw and Drawing to Learn

Young children enter formal schooling with a repertoire of modes of representation with which they try to make sense of the world – drawing, modelling, role play, storying, emergent literacy and numeracy. In drawing they use mark making for kinesthetic pleasure and later learn to repeat patterns and shapes intentionally. From these repeated marks they begin to explore the potential of drawings to represent what they know. A parallel set of drawing strategies with an explicit communicative function develop through social relationships at home or in pre-school/care settings. Children observe and mimic modes of representation and absorb the semiotics modelled by adults or older children in the community/culture[s] in which they are reared. On entering formal school, the messages children receive from the culture of classrooms is that the modes of representation that are valued are the formal symbolic modes of literacy and numeracy whereas teachers perceive drawing as useful for occupational or recreational purposes. Ironically, as children are cultured into ‘academic’ achievements, they lose out on opportunities to engage in alternative modes of representation/symbolic systems, which may offer opportunities for cognitive challenge at higher levels. Thus, whilst pushing children to perform ‘academically’ in the early stages of schooling, we underestimate them ‘intellectually’. At elementary school level children’s mark-making is shaped into a ‘catch-all’, narrative/representational style of drawing across all subjects. Children often elect to explore their own personal, culturally specific ways of drawing outside school as ‘home art’. In school their capabilities in using alternative modes of representation as tools for learning wither away.