Abstract
Drawing is a highly participatory mode of communication, particularly suited to allowing children to express their knowledge and ideas about various aspects of reality. It is necessary to ascertain whether children are able to master drawing sufficiently to place it at the service of their representational intentions, and whether they possess the pictorial flexibility needed to articulate and differentiate their graphic representations. The presence and development of this important cognitive–symbolic ability are investigated. This exploratory study aimed to investigate, in children living in socioeconomic and cultural disadvantaged conditions, (1) the emergence and development of the pictorial flexibility needed to effectively represent and differentiate the building in which they live from the building in which they wish they lived; and (2) the patterns in the number and quality of pictorial differentiation strategies adopted for representational purposes. Two-hundred 8-to-12-year-old Brazilian children living in a favela were asked to produce two specific thematic drawings, representing their real house vs. their desired house. The children’s pictorial representations were coded according to their communicative efficacy (allowing the viewer to distinguish, in each pair of drawings, between the real house and the one desired by the drawer) and according to the number and type of pictorial strategies used to diversify the two types of buildings. The children were had sufficient representational flexibility to effectively perform a pictorial differentiation task, and express their point of view on the environment in which they live, and imagine alternative scenarios, adopting a variety of painting strategies. Drawing, prompted with a contrastive task, has proven to be effective in allowing even disadvantaged children to differentiate their real and desired urban environments. Children’s pictorial flexibility manifests itself through a wide range of strategies, varying in number and quality according to the age of the artists. As such, its use can be encouraged by educational interventions aimed at broadening the expressive potential of children, and as a tool for fostering resilience.
Highlights
The purpose of this study is to investigate whether children between the ages of 8 and 12, who grew up in difficult socioeconomic and cultural circumstances, (1) possess sufficient pictorial flexibility to make drawings of their home, varying the pictorial characteristics of the buildings depicted, in a communicatively effective manner; and (2) the number and type of pictorial strategies with which they pursue the goal of effectively differentiating the buildings depicted, according to the age of the drawers
Are three examples of drawings of a real versus ideal house with the relative pictorial strategies used (Figs. 1, 2, and 3). In this exploratory study, we investigated whether children’s pictorial flexibility, and the ability to perform pictorial representations that deviate from canonical, conventional representations of buildings, were present in children living in favelas
We aimed to investigate the developmental pattern that pictorial flexibility would assume in relation to the age of the participants
Summary
Most of the interventions used drawings of the buildings produced spontaneously or in response to very general requests, sometimes in a clinical setting by children directly involved in adverse conditions This method of collecting pictorial material allows a great deal of arbitrariness in interpretation by the recipient (whether psychological or educational professional) and leaves open an important methodological question: Is the viewer in front of a specific drawing of the required theme, inspired and modeled on the crisis, or is it a generic representation, the one that a child would have drawn anyway, even under normal conditions? We expect that the representational flexibility of the participants will be reflected in the use of fewer pictorial strategies among the younger than among the older ones; we expect that only the older ones will use more complex differentiation strategies, while the younger ones will use simpler pictorial strategies
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