It took an artist to first say that every child is an artist. It is easy to imagine an athlete saying that every child is an athlete because they love to run, or a civil engineer saying that every child is an engineer because they build dikes after rainfalls. Why don’t we agree that a child, is a child, is a child, is just about anything a child cares to be at play?
This blog post is about children making drawings while learning about natural science. It is about 23 children 3-6 year old in an early childhood class that participated in a study led by three researchers: Sabela F. Monteira, Maria Pilar Jiménez-Aleixandre, and Isabel Martins. The project resulted in a detailed article published in Cultural Studies of Science Education (Vol. 19, pp. 295-315) and available on Springer Nature: Cultural semiotic resources in young children’s science drawings.
The researchers examined two series of drawings of snails made a month apart during three years. They asked “which meanings do young children communicate with visual cultural semiotic resources available in the science classroom?” The authors deserve credit for recognizing “the need for expanding the borders of the object of research and examining the full social situation where learning takes place, considering the specific culture as well as the dynamics of children’s thinking.” They provide an excellent conceptual and historical context for their project, giving children, their teachers, and their interactions enough space for a solid input in the results. They understand drawing as a “social process” whose contents are “culturally mediated.”
Their observations are many and valuable. They documented the evolution from anthropomorphic, often influenced by the media or children’s literature, to more realistic representations, based on experience. They describe the strategies children use to highlight body parts or elements of importance to them. The positive impact of verbal exchanges with their teachers on the drawing experience is also underlined. Another valuable insight from this study is the influence of writing skills on the drawing tasks. The children learn to write and read parallel to the project, and this development is integrated to their drawing activity and how they frame specific elements of their images.
The research team did not say that every child is a malacologist. Two thumbs up to that.
