Dear Simon,
In regard to your comments on this topic. I think you make a very important
point about the components of play and viability of teaching young children
to draw.
The way that anything is taught changes as children grow. Very young
children are directed rather than instructed. Small children are
delightfully wilful because they have little or no concept of rules which
are really not much use to them as they proceed through the first years of
their lives on a basis of testing and then trial and error, and rely on
their carers to take care of the consequences. Later on issues of
comprehension become more sophisticated: the 'what if' recedes and the 'if
this, then that' comes into focus until the 'that' becomes the 'only' and
obscures other possibilities. In my mind, it is possible to direct children
at around four or five in how to draw - just as with reading or writing - by
moving though experiment to cause and effect then, as they get older to
concrete objectives. However, I would be concerned about embedding realism
as an objective early on in the psyche of the taught and of the teachers.
For example, I feel that purely expressive activities are lacking in the
current school curricula and drawing is a tool for expression. Should
drawing be introduced as a product orientated activity? Would that depress
the expressive role of drawing in young children lives? And anyway is not
the really interesting thing about drawing the process?
Giving children access to a range of drawing tools and techniques, and as
Simon suggests, encouraging looking and approaching drawing with a similar
model to play, may be the most appropriate way to promote a love of and
confidence in drawing at a young age. Getting at realism can happen later
and will happen with greater ease for children familiar with drawing. How
and what to draw is then much more a matter of choice.
Mona Brooks includes in her book lots of images of untutored and tutored
drawings made by young children. The first, without-instruction, are
intriguing scribbles and the schooled drawings are charming realisms. But I
wonder whether the scribbling stage may be important, those marks have their
own internal meanings, the amount of movement is significant and I'm sure
has some purpose. Should
children be rushed out of this stage? And what does it achieve?
On page 39 Mona includes a paragraph on how to deal with a child crying in
class. Really a child should not come to tears over a drawing, an adult
possibly, children definitely not.
I think we need to be clear about why realistic drawing is useful, (or even
why realistic drawing?) and separate it from other drawing outcomes.
Drawing with control, being aware of techniques, understanding about drawing
tools, developing preferences, using drawing as a means of observing, as a
way of recording thoughts and ideas and drawing for the purposes of other
subjects, these are important elements of drawing which are valuable and can
be taught in their own right.
Mona is addressing the complaint which prohibits many people from drawing,
and offering a remedy in the form of 'hot house' type learning. The
complaint is that young people desist from many types of drawing when they
'fail' to make the realistic drawings which are thought to come from 'visual
data' (Mona's term). But another approach would be to reorganize the
'conceptual space' to incorporate the idea that expressive drawing, pattern
making, symbolic drawing and all the other types that people can think of,
are as valuable as realism. Bingo! problem gone.
I would be interested in hearing from people in the business of educating
young children. In the context of this discussion their comments would be
very valuable.
Katrinka
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