Drawing, Bodies, and Difference: Heterocorporeal Dialogs and Other Intra-Actions in Children’s Classroom Drawing

Abstract

In the current climate of state-mandated education standards and assessment that prioritize math and language arts in U.S. schools, drawing, an accessible and/or pleasurable endeavor for a wide variety of children, is undervalued. Although research in art education over the past four decades has shown children’s drawing and drawings to be rich sites of imaginative, sociocultural, performative, relational, and intra-active learning, encounters with drawing continue to be marginalized in elementary education settings as coloring, busy work, and/or copying. In an 8-month-long case study on children’s drawing and drawings in a kindergarten writer’s workshop, I focused on intra-actions involving material, discursive, and emergent events through which children, drawing, and discourses were mutually enacted. The purpose of this article is to draw attention to nuances in children’s classroom drawing in order to cultivate dialog between art educators, early childhood educators, and language and literacy educators, among others.