Young children talking and drawing

Abstract

Research related to how young children’s drawings change and develop is well documented and an extensive literature on this area can be traced back to the nineteenth century. Most of this literature, however, focuses on developmental aspects and largely fails to explore what would seem to be an essential ingredient in each drawing’s production—children’s simultaneous utterances which might potentially inform the nature and content of the work and help elucidate their intentions and processes of thinking. In this respect, Kress (1997) suggests that at times it seems as though it is only the end product being interpreted, whilst utterances which could help understanding are ignored; and Jameson (1968) opines that what children want to do is to talk to themselves in pictures, thereby weaving stories around the marks being made as a parallel to active fantasy play. These may or may not be true, but although the end products are something tangible which can be viewed by other than those present, what they cannot communicate is the social interaction, problem solving, conceptual and creative thinking, predicting, debate and introspection which may well be a fundamental attendant of the process of drawing.

The relationship between children’s narrative and their drawing process, therefore, formed the basis for this investigation and built on both previous knowledge and many years of observing young children in early years settings. It focused upon children in the two age phases (three to four year olds—nursery, and four to five year olds—reception class) of the English Education Foundation Stage. Narrative observations were carried out during each drawing episode with pairs of children, and audio recordings were also made to complement these.