Towards a Theory of Children's Drawing as Social Practice

Abstract

In our research and theory, we should think about independently of the ways in which we think about children's drawings. We should understand children's graphic practices as a form of social practice and should attend to the way this form of practice is related to other, non-graphic, practices. Children's drawing is a social practice. The practice leaves an artifactual residue. The core of the argument is that the practice is distinct from the residue. The distinction is that the reasons children have for engaging in the practice of drawing are not identical with what can be found out from the residues of their practice. The functions of drawing practices and the reasons for engaging in them may be connected with the drawings produced, but the connection is not necessary. These functions and reasons may be different from the reasons for using a particular set of graphic strategies to produce a particular image, and in the same way making a theory of the practice of children's drawing may require different thinking to that required by making a theory of children's drawings. The weakness of existing theory about children's drawing is that it does not acknowledge the distinction between the residues and the practice. The field produces theories of children's actual drawings and assumes that these cover all there is to know about their practice of drawing. So only one kind of thinking is applied to understanding children and drawing. This thinking was used in the first attempts to make sense of children's drawing. It continues to be used in contemporary theory, whether this has to do with the cognitive and developmental concerns of psychology or with the interest of art education to understand the needs of children. The literature about children's drawing is complex because it contains many different purposes and methods. But all of it is pinned to the project of making sense of the drawings made by children. If for this claim is needed, a survey of the titles or abstracts of contemporary research should suffice. What follows is not a theory of children's drawings. It is an attempt to get clear about the kind of theory needed by showing what is different about understanding drawing as a social practice. It tries to introduce the implications of thinking about children's drawing in this way. At its most basic level, the argument is that those implications are consistent with thinking about any form of social practice. Why Children's Drawings are the Center of Attention and Why This is a Problem Children's drawings are almost perfect objects to study. Drawings present a constantly renewable flow of data that can be used to make many different interests in childhood intelligible and, simultaneously, they present an archaeological resource with which to make sense of the way those interests change through childhood. They can be collected as a body of artifacts containing formal qualities that can be connected to the mental operations and capacities of children. They can also be used as physical trace evidence (Merriam, 1990) to direct researchers to contexts in which the meaning and functioning of drawings might be discovered. They direct researchers to drawers from whom reasons, interests and intentions might be extracted, or who provide performances of drawing that can be observed. Drawings are as useful for writing up laws of human biology and behavior as they are for writing down culture. The first problem for theory about children's drawing (as a practice) is that the drawings produced are too seductive a research object to ignore. Many different interests can be satisfied by methods that begin with drawings and no interest in drawing has, as yet, demanded any other kind of method. There is no knowledge about the drawing of children that is not determined by a prior interest in the drawings of children. So the entire body of literature about children's drawing consists of cumulative strands of the possible ways children's drawings can be used for constructing knowledge. …