‘Their Drawings Were Eloquent’: Learning about Drawing as an Arts-Based Self-Study Method for Researching with Children

ABSTRACT

This article offers detailed accounts of self-study research conducted by two South African teachers who used drawing as an arts-based method to gain insights from children in their schools. While much of the published research on drawing as a self-study method has involved drawing by teachers or teacher educators, the focus here is on two teacher-researchers’ learning from engaging with children’s drawings. The body of the article is arranged as a dialogue facilitated by the teachers’ research supervisor. The two original research exemplars presented in the dialogue illustrate how drawing can be a productive, age-appropriate, and enjoyable mode of bringing children into self-study research. Taken as a whole, the dialogue shows how drawing as a self-study research method can enable the expression of children’s perspectives and experiences, foster a more intrinsically gratifying research experience for children, heighten self-study researchers’ learning from and with children as research partners, and enrich the emotional substance and impact of research with children. This work will be valuable to teachers in diverse contexts who are interested in expanding their repertoire of child-friendly self-study research methods. Furthermore, it can serve as a reminder to pay conscientious and self-reflexive attention to the human relationships and emotions that give life to all self-study research.

KEYWORDS:

• Arts-based research
• drawing
• researching with children
• self-study methodology
• teaching

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge funding from the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa (Incentive Funding for Rated Researchers).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. During the apartheid era (1948–1994), South Africans were racially classified as African, colored, Indian, or white. The apartheid administration used these racial classifications to stratify South African society and create a hierarchy of privilege and dispossession. These racial categories are still used by the current government for policy and data collection purposes.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa [90832].