Angela Anning

Drawing Out Ideas: Graphicacy and Young Children.

Drawing offers a powerful mode for representing and clarifying one‘s own thinking and for communicating ideas to others. Young children instinctively use drawing in the same exploratory way that designers use sketching to ’converse with themselves‘ when generating ideas. The two distinctive traditions of drawing in Technology and Fine Art are replicated in the Design and Technology and Art and Design curricula in England and Wales. However, because we lack research evidence about (i) the processes by which children develop drawing capability and (ii) the effects of school culture and pedagogy on the development of children‘s drawing capability, teachers are confused about how to teach drawing and unsure about the role of graphicacy in promoting children‘s learning in both subjects. In this article the particular dilemmas of teaching design drawing to young children will be discussed. A research agenda for the teaching and learning of drawing in primary schools will be outlined.

Pathways to the Graphicacy Club: the Crossroad of Home and Pre-School

The article challenges the narrow versions of literacy in current versions of early childhood education in the UK. The theoretical underpinning for the paper is drawn from sociocultural perspectives and what Kress (1997) defines as the ‘broad and messy area... of communication and representation’. It is argued that we need to broaden our understanding of literacy to include young children’s representations in graphic and narrative versions, influenced by the media and ‘everyday’ exchanges with siblings and significant adults, that characterize their journeys towards literacy in home settings. When they enter pre-school and start school the versions of representations they are encouraged to do are driven by a narrow emphasis on school versions of literacy and numeracy. The kind of personal and social drawings done at home are discarded. The argument is illustrated by examples of young children drawing in home and school settings taken from a three-year longitudinal study of seven young children’s meaning making as they moved from home to pre-school and the beginning of schooling.

Dilemmas and opportunities of a new curriculum: Design and technology with Young Children

The article draws on the University of Leeds research project Technological Capability in Young Children. The research objectives were to identify and characterize capability in design and technology for children aged 5–11; to document features of progression in capability within the domains of graphicacy, evaluation skills and the handling of tools and equipment; and to identify and investigate factors which contribute to the development of a technological knowledge base in primary school classrooms. The research perspective relates to previous studies of contextual and developmental features of capability and the development of ‘practical intelligence’. Data sources include fieldnotes and video recordings of children working on tasks defined by their teachers as design and technology activities; interviews with the teachers and children about the outcomes of the activities; and contextual data such as availability of materials, resources, use of teacher time, and classroom organization.Analysis of classroom recordings, together with teacher and pupil interviews, revealed a learning environment which presented teachers with new dilemmas and children with opportunities to demonstrate previously unnoted capabilities and deficiencies, particularly in graphicacy, evaluation processes and the manipulation of tools. The findings are exemplified through analysis of critical incidents.

Conversations Around Young Children’s Drawing: The Impact of the Beliefs of Significant Others at Home and School

Children learn to make meanings in communities of practice through interaction with more experienced others. Young children’s strategies for and attitudes to learning are determined by the sociocultural contexts in which they practise those strategies, including learning how to draw within the distinct cultures of home and school. Evidence of meaning making — 2 and 3D representations involving drawing, modelling and play with objects — was collected over one month periods in the Autumns of 98, 99 and 00 from seven young children in home and as they settled into new pre–school and school settings in the North of England. The evidence of the seven children’s meaning making, recorded by photographs and scrap books of their representations, was used as a stimulus in dialogues to elicit parents’ and practitioners’ beliefs about the value and significance of different modes meaning making, including drawing in the contexts of home and school. Their conversations were recorded and transcribed for analysis. Evidence from the perspectives of parents, practitioners and the children was triangulated with evidence of contextual features for learning around the children’s drawings. Episodes from analysis of the data sets will be used to illustrate how the children were inducted into the conventions of ‘school’ drawing whilst often retaining a distinct personal drawing agenda at home. Implications will be drawn for the status and function of drawing in the education of young children in formal and informal learning contexts.

‘When is a teacher not a teacher?’: knowledge creation and the professional identity of teachers within multi-agency teams

Education is centre stage in current UK government initiatives to promote multi-agency team work. This paper draws on a research project which explored the way in which multi-disciplinary teams work and learn together in their practice with children, to consider the implications of ‘joined-up’ practice for theorizing dilemmas of knowledge creation and identity transformation for professionals in multi-agency teams. The paper focuses primarily on the experiences of education professionals. We exemplify some dilemmas of ‘joined-up’ team participation in specific workplace activities involving knowledge exchange. We then explore the impact of belonging to multi-agency teams on professional roles, identities and learning. The paper then summarizes strategies which professionals used for resolving dilemmas around learning and knowledge creation, and considers how participating in shared workplace activities might enable or constrain professionals to consoli date their professional identities and learning. Drawing on theoretical research into workplace participation and professional learning, the paper examines implications for theorizing the professional identity of teachers in multi-agency team work, within a systemic model that takes account of: creating new knowledge and practice; enhancing professional identity; and building inter-professional communities.

Learning to Draw and Drawing to Learn

Young children enter formal schooling with a repertoire of modes of representation with which they try to make sense of the world – drawing, modelling, role play, storying, emergent literacy and numeracy. In drawing they use mark making for kinesthetic pleasure and later learn to repeat patterns and shapes intentionally. From these repeated marks they begin to explore the potential of drawings to represent what they know. A parallel set of drawing strategies with an explicit communicative function develop through social relationships at home or in pre-school/care settings. Children observe and mimic modes of representation and absorb the semiotics modelled by adults or older children in the community/culture[s] in which they are reared. On entering formal school, the messages children receive from the culture of classrooms is that the modes of representation that are valued are the formal symbolic modes of literacy and numeracy whereas teachers perceive drawing as useful for occupational or recreational purposes. Ironically, as children are cultured into ‘academic’ achievements, they lose out on opportunities to engage in alternative modes of representation/symbolic systems, which may offer opportunities for cognitive challenge at higher levels. Thus, whilst pushing children to perform ‘academically’ in the early stages of schooling, we underestimate them ‘intellectually’. At elementary school level children’s mark-making is shaped into a ‘catch-all’, narrative/representational style of drawing across all subjects. Children often elect to explore their own personal, culturally specific ways of drawing outside school as ‘home art’. In school their capabilities in using alternative modes of representation as tools for learning wither away.

Investigating the Impact of Working in Multi-Agency Service Delivery Settings in the UK on Early Years Practitioners' Beliefs and Practices.

In the UK Centres of Excellence were funded by the DfES to model high quality, multi-agency, early years services for young children and their families. They were precursors to Children’s Centres to be established across the UK. Early Excellence Centres were evaluated at national and local levels. This article will draw on data from local evaluations of two contrasting Centres of Excellence: interviews with staff to explore shifts in their perspectives on the rhetoric and reality of multi-agency team work; and responses by staff to vignettes representing conflicts and dilemmas in the delivery of services. The article explores methodological complexities of accessing values underpinning action in practice in multi-agency teams working in inner cities.

Comparisons and Contrasts Between Elementary/Primary ’School Situated Design’ and ’Workplace Design’ in Canada and England

There is a lack of evidence that examines, together, the triad of how teachers in elementary/primary schools are translating curriculum requirements for teaching design, within technology frameworks, in their classrooms, how their students then proceed with design, and how ’school situated design’ relates to ’workplace design’. This paper explores the relationships between designerly thinking and behaviours situated in classrooms and in the workplace, beliefs about how designing is learned in schools and in the ’real world’, and children’s, teachers’ and designers’ understanding of design. These are be illustrated by extracts from interviews with teachers, children and designers and evidence of designing in classrooms and in the workplace. Similarities and differences between evidence from ’school situated design’ and ’workplace design’ and from Canada and the United Kingdom (UK) are discussed.

Appropriateness or Effectiveness in the Early Childhood Curriculum in the UK: Some research evidence

Policy on preschool education and care is the focus of political and professional debate in the UK. In a climate of social and economic accountability, there has been an ongoing debate about the value of pre‐school education. In this article, I argue that in debating its value, we have not made a clear distinction between the appropriateness of different forms of education and care settings for young childrens learning and the effectiveness of different models of curricula offered to them. In disentangling these two features of ‘value’, I review evidence from research into the inter‐related features of the contexts in which young children are educated in the UK, the content of the curriculum they are offered and the pedagogic and organisational features of teaching and learning they are offered. Finally a new agenda for research into early childhood education is outlined.

The Role of Drawing in Young Children's Journeys towards Literacy.

The focus of this article is the role of drawings in the journeys of young children towards literacy. The argument is that young children learn from home contexts a wide range of approaches towards literacy. At school their flexibility in using these approaches is reshaped into narrow versions of literacy based on learning to read, write and become numerate. Children continue to explore alternative modes of representation at home and amongst their peer group in informal learning contexts outside school. The argument is illustrated with examples from a project, which followed the changes in seven young childrens drawing behaviours as they made the transition from home to school. It is suggested that we need a radical reappraisal of what it means to be a literate child in 2004; and that the literacy curriculum in early childhood settings needs to be reframed to reflect this reappraisal.