Children’s drawing: its relation to learning and instruction in kindergarten and primary education

SCHEUER, N. Y TEUBAL

Nicosia, Chipre

Simposio; 11th Biennial Conference del European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction; 2005

European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction

The aim of this Symposium is to analyze from different theoretical and methodological perspectives children’s use of drawing, drawing strategies and drawing conceptions with relation to learning and teaching processes. Drawing has been a key object of psychological and educational study along most of the 20th century, but it lost importance in the past 30 years. The decline of interest in drawing as a topic of psychological research might be associated with the loss of vitality of the traditional approaches dealing with it (maturational, psychometric and projective) in the current psychological and educational agenda, concerned with themes as the intervention of metacognitive processes in notational production; processes whereby a child appropriates cultural ways and uses of representation or the ways in which the production of external representations contributes to key sociocognitive processes such as memory, referential strategies, meaning elaboration, explicitation of various components (specific domain knowledge, mental attitudes, self) or representational redescription.Lately, there appears to be a revival of interest in children’s drawing. This is probably due to two factors. First, the fact that drawing is a typical activity which children are highly motivated to engage in. Second, the new forms of cultural production and communication are increasingly characterized by the use of a great variety of graphic texts. However, learners are most often regarded as readers rather than as producers of pictorial images.In sum, there is a need to generate new theoretical and methodological frameworks so as to permit a fruitful re-incorporation of drawing into psycho-educational investigation.  This symposium attempts to contribute in such a direction by bringing together five different studies dealing with children’s drawing strategies and conceptions. In order to gain in depth of analysis we will focus on early and middle childhood / Kindergarten and primary education.