Children’s ‘eye views’ of an archaeological site: A multimodal social semiotic approach to children’s drawings

Abstract

This paper presents eight-year-old children's ‘eye views’ of the archaeological site of the Agora in Athens, Greece, based on drawings made during an educational programme on site. Complementing a significant body of research on drawings, we introduce a multimodal social semiotic perspective to explore drawings as ‘designed’ accounts of children’s ‘eye views’. We argue that each account arises as an agentive response to their interests and prompts in the environment framing their experience, such as features of the site and the educational programme. Based on four drawings, we identify salient elements of children’s experience in their representations which we analyze as material realizations of (i) their interests and agency, (ii) their visual and embodied engagement with the archaeological site, and (iii) the framing of the educational task and overall programme. Our findings contribute to research on the importance of visual in learning.