New Images of Thought in the Study of Childhood Drawing (Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories) 3031071425, 9783031071423

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Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories Series Editors: Karen Malone · Marek Tesar · Sonja Arndt

Laura Trafí-Prats Christopher M. Schulte   Editors

New Images of Thought in the Study of Childhood Drawing

Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories Series Editors Karen Malone, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, VIC, Australia Marek Tesar, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand Sonja Arndt, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Carlton, VIC, Australia Editorial Board Gail Boldt, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, USA Iris Duhn, Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia Hillevi Lenz-Taguchi, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden Linda Knight, RMIT University, Mill Park, VIC, Australia Walter Kohan, Rio de Janeiro State University, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Peter Kraftl, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK Casey Myers, Kent State University, Kent, OH, USA Pauliina Rautio, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland Tracy Skelton, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

This book series presents original and cutting edge knowledge for a growing field of scholarship about children. Its focus is on the interface of children being in the everyday spaces and places of contemporary childhoods, and how different theoretical approaches influence ways of knowing the future lives of children. The authors explore and analyse children’s lived embodied everyday experiences and encounters with tangible objects and materials such as artefacts, toys, homes, landscapes, animals, food, and the broader intangible materiality of representational objects, such as popular culture, air, weather, bodies, relations, identities and sexualities. Monographs and edited collections in this series are attentive to the mundane everyday relationships, in-between ‘what is’ and ‘what could be’, with matters and materials. The series is unique because it challenges traditional western-centric views of children and childhood by drawing on a range of perspectives including Indigenous, Pacifica, Asian and those from the Global South. The book series is also unique as it provides a shift from developmental, social constructivists, structuralist approaches to understanding and theorising about childhood. These dominant paradigms will be challenged through a variety of post-positivist/postqualitative/posthumanist theories of being children and childhood.

Laura Trafí-Prats · Christopher M. Schulte Editors

New Images of Thought in the Study of Childhood Drawing

Editors Laura Trafí-Prats Faculty of Education Manchester Metropolitan University Manchester, UK

Christopher M. Schulte School of Art University of Arkansas Fayetteville, AR, USA

ISSN 2523-3408 ISSN 2523-3416 (electronic) Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories ISBN 978-3-031-07142-3 ISBN 978-3-031-07143-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07143-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Ingrid and her wondrous drawings For Sophia and Liam, whose artful adventures continue to inspire

Acknowledgements

New Images of Thought in the Study of Childhood Drawing is made of nine original contributions and an afterword that elaborate meaningful insights around questions of how drawings come to matter in the lives of children. We are profoundly indebted to the knowledge, curiosity, playfulness, and desire to think children’s drawings in the inventive ways that the chapters and visual essays mobilize. We appreciate the precious time and intellectual efforts that have been invested in each piece in a two-year period (2020–2021) when everyone involved confronted overwhelming pandemic conditions. One possible argument to pose here is that to have the time to develop an inquiry in relation to children’s drawings whilst being under a deathly threat is quite a privilege. It certainly is, and we recognize this, but there are also insights in the chapters and visual essays in this volume that invite readers to seriously consider the entangled nature of children’s drawings, including the less privileging relations that we live with. After all, drawing is not just a luxury, a form of entertainment or something pretty that inclined children and artists do. Such thinking is a way of attaching to children’s drawings certain matters of concern that narrow what a drawing is and can do, and what it can become. It shapes our systems of valuation, the role and visibility of children’s drawings in culture, the epistemic status of children, drawing as an inclusive and participative space, and so forth. All the chapters provoke the readers in different ways to leave such thoughts in suspension and to widen their imagination around the rich expressions of life that are present in drawing practices. ∗ ∗ ∗ We are very grateful to the series editors, Karen Malone, Marek Tesar, and Sonja Arndt, for believing that the book could constitute a worthy contribution to the remarkable collection of studies which comprises Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories. It is an honor to stand side by side with the currently published volumes. A mention should also go to the team at Springer who has supported the book’s production. Specifically, we wish to thank Cynthia Kroonen, Astrid Noordermeer, Amudha Vijayarangan‚ Preetha Kuttiappan, and vii

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Acknowledgements

Kayalvizhi Saravanakumar whose support has made this possible. For this we are deeply appreciative. ∗ ∗ ∗ Scholars and friends who have led the study of children’s drawings before us are responsible for inspiring and instigating this project of inquiry. In this spirit of recognition and thanks, we wish to acknowledge the work of Brent and Marjorie Wilson, Christine Marmé Thompson, Linda Knight, Sylvia Kind, Paul Duncum, Olga Ivashkevich, and Vicky Grube. You continue to inspire us. ∗ ∗ ∗ Laura wants to express her appreciation toward Chris’ prolific writing on and around the study of children’s drawings. It has been a central motivation in making this book a reality, unmistakably influencing the proposition contained in its title. Despite differences in time, space, and academic schedules, we have managed to navigate and conclude a very generative project. Kudos to you, Chris! Finally, Laura gives a loving nudge to Eric and Ingrid, who make life worth living. Ingrid’s drawings have and continue to be a source of wonder and provocation. Chris wishes to express his appreciation to Laura, not only for initiating this project and for the care and attention given to its becoming, but also for the mentorship and support she has generously provided to him over the last decade. Perhaps more than anything, though, Chris wishes to acknowledge Laura’s ongoing courage to think ‘thought’ into a frenzy, to bring it to the edge, a quality that is not only rare and refreshing but also a continued source of inspiration and replenishment for Chris, and for many others who study childhood art. Chris also wishes to express his love and appreciation to Jill, whose support never wavers, and to Sophia and Liam, who remind him daily of what matters most in life.

Contents

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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1 An Introduction: For New Images of Thought in the Study of Children’s Drawings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Laura Trafí-Prats and Christopher M. Schulte

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2 Are We There Yet?: In Search of Drawing Events in Early Childhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Christine Marmé Thompson

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3 On Children’s and Students’ Drawing Practices: Advocating a Pedagogy of Taking-Care . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dennis Atkinson

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4 “These Are Lion Tracks”: A Place-Stories Approach to Childhood Drawing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Christopher M. Schulte

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5 Curves, Sways, Loops, Folds and Witches’ Traps: Sensing Duration in Sylvie’s Drawings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Laura Trafí-Prats

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6 Drawing and Being Drawn by the Hand: A Dance of Animacy . . . . . . 103 Sylvia Kind 7 Strawing: Perpetual Line . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 Lucy Hill and Alice Lyons 8 Drawing as Felt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 Marissa McClure Sweeny, Robert Sweeny, Stella Sweeny, and Luca Sweeny

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9 City as Soundscape: Sounding-Drawings and Drawing-Sounds as (Re)creations of Urban Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 Dan Wheatley and Catherine Clements Afterword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175 Jayne Osgood

Editors and Contributors

About the Editors Laura Trafí-Prats is an art educator and senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Faculty of Health and Education. She is a former associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her articles have appeared in journals like Studies in Art Education, Qualitative Inquiry, Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies and others. She has co-edited with Aurelio Castro the volume Visual participatory arts-based research in the city: Ontology, aesthetics and ethics (2022, Routledge). Her current research utilises visual arts and sensory methods in participative processes with children and youth as ways of mapping lived experiences of space and architecture in urban environments. Christopher M. Schulte is Endowed Associate Professor of Art Education and Assistant Director of the School of Art at the University of Arkansas, where he also serves as Director of the Center for the Study of Childhood Art. Informed by critical, poststructuralist, posthumanist, and decolonial approaches, Christopher’s scholarship, teaching, and community engagement focus on the artistic, play-based, and aesthetic practices of children, with particular attention given to the process of drawing in historical and contemporary childhoods. His research has appeared in handbooks and other edited volumes, as well as national and international peerreviewed journals. He is co-editor with Hayon Park of Visual Art with Young Children: Practices, Pedagogies, and Learning (2021, Routledge), editor of Ethics and Research With Young Children: New Perspectives (2019, Bloomsbury), and coeditor with Christine Marmé Thompson of Communities of Practice: Art, Play, and Aesthetics in Early Childhood (2018, Springer).

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Contributors Dennis Atkinson is Emeritus Professor at Goldsmiths University of London, Department of Educational Studies. He established the Centre for Arts and Learning at Goldsmiths in 2006. He has published in numerous international academic journals and edited collections since 1991 as well as eight books on art and education including: Art in Education: Identity and Practice (2001, Kluwer) Art, Equality and Learning: Pedagogies Against the State (2011, Sense Publishers), Art, Disobedience and Ethics (2018, Palgrave Macmillan), Art Ethics and Education (2020, Brill, edited with Carl-Peter Buschkuhle and Raphael Vella). His forthcoming book is entitled Pedagogies of Taking care: The Gift of Otherness (Bloomsbury 2022). In 2015, he was awarded the Ziegfeld Award by the United States Society of Education through Art for outstanding international contributions to art education. Lucy Hill is an independent visual artist with a particular interest in early childhood art education. She was an ‘atelierista’ for ten years with Woodland Park Preschool in Westport (Ireland). She also works with agencies and institutions on arts education projects, including Helium Arts, Kids Own Publishing Partnership, and as a Creative Associate with the Arts Council of Ireland. She was the inaugural Professor John Coolahan Early Years Artist in Residence at The Ark Cultural Centre for Children in Dublin. She also lectures at the School of Arts Education and Movement at Dublin City University. Lucy has recently completed her PhD at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin for which she was awarded an Irish Research Council postgraduate scholarship. Sylvia Kind, PhD is a faculty instructor in Early Childhood Education at Capilano University and an atelierista at the Capilano University Children’s Centre. Her work is guided by a/r/tography and research-creation practices, and is motivated by an interest in young children’s studio practices, their lively material improvisations and collective experimentations, and in developing understandings of studio research in early childhood contexts. She has co-authored the book Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education, co-edited Drawing as Language, and has written several journal articles and book chapters on studio practices in early childhood. Alice Lyons is author of Oona, a novel, (Lilliput Press, Dublin 2020) and three books of poetry, most recently The Breadbasket of Europe (Veer Books, London 2016). She is recipient of the 2002 Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry and a Radcliffe Fellowship in Poetry and New Media at Harvard University 2015–16. She is Lecturer in Writing + Literature at the Yeats Academy of Arts, Design & Architecture, Atlantic Technological University, Sligo. Marissa McClure Sweeny is Art Education Program Coordinator and Women’s and Gender Studies Affiliate Faculty at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. As a mother-scholar, artist and educator she explores contemporary theories of young children’s art, young children’s use of digital media, community-based art education and feminist theory through research and art making in collaboration with young

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children and with materials and environments. She is the creator of The Scribble Squad and SQUAD Art Studio, a research collaborative of parent artists and scholars and a community-based art studio for children ages 0-6 and their caregivers. She regularly shares her work with young children through publications, presentations and exhibitions. Jayne Osgood is Professor of Education at the Centre for Education Research & Scholarship at Middlesex University since June 2015. Prior to that she started her research career at the National Foundation for Educational Research in 1997, and then moved to London Metropolitan University (from 2001–2014) working within the Institute for Policy Studies in Education. Over her academic career she has held visiting professorships in Australia, Hong Kong and Norway. She is currently Professor II at Inland University, Norway. Professor Osgood has extensive experience of undertaking a wide range of funded research for various sponsors. She is currently directing a project funded by the GCRF into decolonising children’s digital play. She is Book Series Editor at Bloomsbury Academic: Feminist Thought in Childhood Research; and Book Series Editor at Springer: Key Thinkers in Education. Christine Marmé Thompson is Professor Emerita of Art Education at Penn State University, where she taught from 2001–2017, following 16 years on faculty of the School of Art & Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Christine taught at Virginia Commonwealth University (2017–2018) and is currently a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her research focuses on drawing in early childhood as a social and material practice, and the interrelationships of childhood studies and art education. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including Visual Inquiry, Qualitative Inquiry, Studies in Art Education, Visual Arts Research, Arts Education Policy Review, and Art Education. Her most recent book, co-edited with Christopher Schulte, is Communities of Practice: Art, Play and Aesthetics in Early Childhood (2018). Dr. Thompson was selected to present the John and Betty Michael Autobiographical Lecture at the University of Miami, OH, in 2019. Dan Wheatley and Catherine Clements are directors of TASC, The Architecture School for Children, which is an artist organisation in Manchester, UK, with a trajectory of two decades developing collaborative projects with children, young people, teachers, families and cultural organisations around experiencing the architecture of everything. Dan and Catherine are also associate lecturers at Manchester Metropolitan University. Collectively and individually their work traverses’ film, illustration, photography, audio, set design, sculpture, architecture and site-specific installation. Both artists are makers of things and are interested in bringing these different artistic processes together to create multi-layered immersive, sensory interventions; that challenge perceptions of how we understand, respond to and interact with space.

Chapter 1

An Introduction: For New Images of Thought in the Study of Children’s Drawings Laura Trafí-Prats and Christopher M. Schulte

Abstract Childhood drawing has long been a subject of interest for researchers, educators, and other interested adults. What children draw, how they come to engage in this work, the milieus in which it occurs, and the rationales that move them, are considerations that remain at the forefront of existing research and theory. Yet, while there is a sense of continuity among the interests reflected by those who study children’s drawing and the questions that are raised may not altogether shift or change, at least not dramatically, the conceptual orientations used to animate this work certainly have. From developmental and sociocultural perspectives to the influence of critical, poststructuralist and posthumanist new materialist approaches, our conceptual orientations give shape to the encounters we have with children and the situatedness of drawing in their lives. Yet, there will always be a need to fashion new images of thought, with the power to orientate us to children’s drawing in ways that are more vitalistic and affective and that differently attune us to the relationalities in which children and their drawing come to matter. This chapter provides a sketch of the various conceptual orientations currently structuring the study of childhood drawing. In addition to outlining what these conceptual orientations are and how they remain a shaping presence in our relations to children’s art, the chapter also explores the need to engage in the creation of new, different, and unsettling images of thought. Keywords History of children’s drawing · Developmentalism · Socio-cultural perspectives · Post-philosophies · Posthumanism · New materialisms

L. Trafí-Prats (B) Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK e-mail: [email protected] C. M. Schulte University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, Fayetteville, AR, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Trafí-Prats and C. M. Schulte (eds.), New Images of Thought in the Study of Childhood Drawing, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07143-0_1

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Fig. 1.1 Sequence of three images from Sophia’s book, illustrating the event of Sophia and her friends, Vivian and Ellia, preparing to defeat the one-eyed monster known as “cyclops”

Two years ago, Sophia, eight at the time, returned home from school with a small square shaped book that had been created from loose-leaf paper. Inside this small book there were three drawings, each representing a rather significant departure from Sophia’s usual drawing fare, not only from the standpoint of what she would typically create at school but also at home (see Fig. 1.1). Excited by the work and curious to learn more, Chris inquired. “Sophia, these drawings are amazing! What’s happening here? Will you tell me more?” With a snack in hand, Sophia was quick to support Chris’ interest in her work. “Of course. That’s the one-eyed monster, dad. He’s a really really really bad monster. He’s a cyclops.” “A cyclops?” Chris asked, seeking confirmation. “Yeah, he’s a cyclops.” Sensing that [her dad] may require further explanation, Sophia continued. “A cyclops is a one-eyed giant, a monster giant with one giant round eye.” “Oh, my goodness.” [Chris] replied. “The cyclops sounds kind of scary.” Having learned more about the cyclops, [Chris] found [himself] growing increasingly curious about the trio of figures that were standing to the left of this one-eyed creature. “So, who are these people?” he asked, pointing to the three figures. “Oh, that’s me and my friends. You see, that’s Vivian (far left) and that’s Ellia (in the middle). We are going to kill the one-eyed monster, dad.” “You are?” “Oh yeah, dad, we are going to kill that monster. But we’ll have to make another book to do it.” Chris was now even more curious to learn about the context in which this book of drawings came about. So, he inquired: “Did you make this in art class?” “Nope. I just made it. I think I was supposed to make something else. I think I was supposed to make something about the book we were reading in class, but I just really wanted to make this book.” To learn more, Chris asked: “What book were you reading in class?” At first, Sophia hesitated. “Ummm…” But then she continued: “I don’t remember. I just really wanted to do this because we were playing monster on the playground and it was really fun. William said he was a one-eyed monster.” As Chris continued to flip through the book and admire the drawings, Sophia returned to her seat and finished her snack. After a few minutes had passed, she spoke up again, this time with a request: “Dad, take this book to work and tell everyone that your daughter made it. Tell them my name is Sophia and I am 8-years old. And tell them I am making another book and that the one-eyed monster will die. That’s my prediction.”1

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Sadly, the book never made it to work. Sophia ended up taking it back to school. As a parent, Chris assumed it would be returned home at the end of the year. Unfortunately, two months after this exchange, Sophia’s school closed due to Covid-19. None of her work was made available for pick-up.

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1.1 Childhood Drawing: An Overview There is no shortage of positions from which the practice of childhood drawing has been considered (for a review, see Thompson & Schulte, 2019). And while these positions may vary with respect to how children come to be understood and the way in which their drawing is valued or attended to, there is no mistake in the fact that what ends up being valued, generally speaking, is the idea that drawing—and art making, more broadly—is of considerable importance in children’s lives. Take for example the vignette above, which features a brief exchange between Chris and his daughter, Sophia, about a series of drawings she created while at school. While certainly limited in scope, this vignette does well to position our earlier point that while drawing is routinely framed as a practice of significance in children’s lives and children themselves may well be understood as savvy and capable cultural producers (e.g. de Rijke, 2019), there are still considerable differences at play when it comes to the matter of how these recognitions are brought into focus. In other words, while the importance of children’s drawing is unlikely to be disputed, the nature of how this importance is constituted as such remains a subject of great debate.

1.2 Development: The Dominant Discourse One perspective that always seems to have the requisite appeal and credibility to outpace or overpower the alternatives is that of development, what is also commonly referred to as the developmental discourse (e.g. Burman, 2016; Moss, 2015; Walkerdine, 2005). In fact, despite an increasingly diverse landscape of inquiries related to childhood drawing, including nearly five decades of research and theory of which a significant portion is critical in orientation (e.g. Duncum, 1993; Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2017; Thompson, 1990, 1995; Thompson & Bales, 1991; Wilson & Wilson, 1981; Wolf & Perry, 1988), the developmental discourse continues to prevail. For this reason the developmental discourse is often described as the dominant discourse as it relates to the study of art in childhood (Sakr et al., 2018). Individualized in focus, the developmental discourse is structured around the idea that children’s proficiency as artists is best demonstrated by how they manage to progress towards an increasingly realistic ideal in their drawing and art making. Similar to other developmental accounts of children’s growth and learning, there is a clear and predetermined relationship between age and competence. The result of this relationship, when funnelled through the aesthetic filter of visual realism, is an unyielding emphasis on what children draw, with little to no regard for how or why they have come to draw it. In fact, there was a time when the analysis of children’s drawing focused entirely on this type of sensibility—that is, on the drawing itself— and whereby the outcomes of such analysis would be expressed as a kind of print-out of the child’s mind (Golomb, 1993, p. 7).

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In fact, the study of children’s drawing has long been dominated by such interests (e.g. Winner & Gardner, 1981; Kerschensteiner, 1905; Lowenfeld, 1957), which is to say a commitment to establishing universal typologies that highlight what children should be able to draw at a particular age. And to be honest, for many, this remains the focus. These stage-based and quasi-predictive accounts, which result in what Sakr (2017) calls “developmental tick lists” (p. 2), rarely hold space for the “conversations and play that surrounds and supplements” (Thompson, 1995, p. 8) children’s art. Instead, such complexities tend to face erasure or be reduced to the role of background noise (e.g. Atkinson, 2002; Matthews, 2003; Thompson & Schulte, 2019). This isn’t to suggest that what children come to draw should not be prioritized or understood as important. Rather, the point is to highlight how the dominance of this lens, which tends to favour the residues of children’s practice (Pearson, 2001) (see also e.g. Dyson, 2013; Ivashkevich, 2009; Rech Penn, 2019; Schulte, 2011; Sunday, 2015), actually risks marginalizing children and young people whose interests and orientations to drawing are sometimes quite different from the patterns and parameters of normalcy that come to define it (e.g. Knight, 2013; Pearson, 2001; Sakr, 2017; Schulte, 2021). To make this lens the singular story of childhood art (Atkinson, 2016; Thompson, 2021) not only subtracts from view a vast network of child-situated interests, values, and events, but it also unnecessarily pressures artist-educators and other interested adults “to focus children’s efforts and energy in particular directions, rather than following the children’s lead and being genuinely interested in what children do” (Sakr et al., 2018, p. 11). Take for example Sophia’s book, in which she depicts the demise of the one-eyed monster. While a general plot may be relatively clear at first glance, a traditional semiotic analysis tells us very little about Sophia’s intentions or time on the playground, and even less about the game that was played thereabouts. As a result, we are left to wonder about how this idea of the one-eyed monster first came to be, the circumstances that led to William’s transformation into a one-eyed monster, the type of conversations that took place among the children who were involved, and how Sophia and her peers—as part of this social contingent—managed to negotiate the likely fragile tensions that mediated this game (Corsaro & Eder, 1990; Hägglund & Löfdahl, 2012; Löfdahl, 2014). After all, were Sophia and her friends able to overcome or overpower the one-eyed monster? Was this experience so exhilarating that Sophia felt compelled to explore it again, through art? Or was the process of creating this book an opportunity to re-play the same game but with a different outcome? Was it rather an opportunity to produce a different result? Of course, we can’t really know for sure, can we? Especially if our only strategy is to engage in a reading of the artifact alone. So while the kitchen dialogue may provide some semblance of understanding about this work and the complex social, cultural, and affective milieus of which it was part, we are nonetheless left to speculate on how this event managed to re-materialize indoors, in Sophia’s classroom. Nor do we gain clarity about the extent to which it was or was not encouraged in relation to the assigned book project or whether Sophia simply elected to shrink these expectations in favour of her own

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interests. The latter point here being the most important, we think. After all, what we fail most to understand through a developmental lens and the use of a traditional semiotic analysis is the matter of why Sophia chose to make this work and the situated and relational complexities that infilled and supplemented her working process.

1.3 A Sociocultural Approach: The Conviviality of Context and Culture Sensing the tendency of the developmental discourse to obscure more than it reveals (Wilson & Wilson, 1981), researchers of childhood art began to question the dominance of this perspective, both as a guide to practice (e.g. Duncum, 1982, 1988, 1999; Golomb, 2002) and as a reliable grounding for current and future research (e.g. Tarr, 2004; Thompson & Bales, 1991; Wilson & Wilson, 1981, 1982). In an effort to widen the existing network of considerations and to make visible the social content and cultural influences that the developmental perspective had so effectively removed from view (Tarr, 2003), researchers of childhood art began to utilize a sociocultural approach that focused more intently on the contexts in which children’s art was made and the various relationships that informed this work. While the “process of culture” (McClure Vollrath, 2007) has remained a rather consistent presence in the study of children’s art (e.g. Wilson, 1976) (see also Golomb, 2002; Ivashkevich, 2009; Hurwitz & Carroll, 2008; Kindler, 1999; Thompson, 2003), it was in the early 1990s that researchers of childhood art began to turn more intensely towards what Tisdall and Punch (2012) call the “socio-cultural geography” of children’s art. As a result of this turn, the study of children’s art began to engage more directly the relations and situations that gave rise to and mediated children’s making, emphasizing in particular the presence and participation of others and things, and the delicate social dance that occurs while children negotiate their own cultural worlds and those of adults (Thompson, 2006; Wilson, 2007). This focus on the lived experience of children while in the process of making art, often in the context of classrooms and in the company of peers and other interested adults, recentres the timeworn adage that the process of making art is just as important as the product itself (Thompson & Schulte, 2019) (see also Knight, 2013; Pearson, 2001; Wilson & Thompson, 2007). After all, as Pearson (2001) writes: Whatever value drawing has for children is bound to the context in which it takes place, and as the context shifts so does the value. This is why drawing can be play activity, narrative activity, a measured strategy for social approval, or the equally measured pursuit of the inductively grasped competence appropriate to given representation systems. Drawing is also a strategy for coping with boredom, with isolation. It can be a retreat from violent social relations. It can be the means for pursuing a passionate interest in horses or trains which at the same time achieves some or all of the above ends. (pp. 357–358)

By highlighting the situated, variable, and sometimes inarticulable ways that children come to the process of drawing, the matter of who and what gets to count (Kuby et al., 2018) also shifts and rematerializes, an outcome that continues to pose serious

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challenges to some of the most basic assumptions that have underpinned modernist conceptions of childhood art. And as the realities evinced by these time-honoured traditions continue to fracture and destabilize, putting into question the reliability of what we have come to know about children and their art (Korzenik, 1981; Leeds, 1989; Wilson, 1997), researchers and others need to make a concerted and enduring effort to ask new questions, to search for different entry points, and to cultivate philosophical and methodological approaches that occasion distinct, interruptive, unexpected, and at times unpopular perspectives.

1.4 Posthumanist New Materialisms: New Images of Thought in the Study of Children Drawings As Schulte (2016) once contemplated, is it really possible to create concepts that are truly vitalistic and affective, with the power to generate new images of thought for childhood drawing? While the attempt to do so is both necessary and important, the process of doing it is no easy task. St. Pierre (2016) underscores this point, writing that the process of thinking with concepts that do not depend on rationality, the primacy of language, and the centrality of human identity of the Western cogito is extremely difficult. This is because most educational qualitative research and theory operates by way of these very concepts (St. Pierre, 2004) (see also De Freitas, 2012; Rautio, 2013; Taguchi, 2009). We have been taught, educated, and lived our careers as artists and educators with and through the normative relations of rationalist liberal humanism. To consider the more-than-human, non-representational, and affective dimensions of being, becoming, knowing, and relating requires an orientation to concepts that is nimble in its delineation of problems in the study of children’s drawing. Thinking with concepts, going back to philosophy, provides opportunities to reveal the ontological, epistemological, and ethical assumptions that keep us stuck in logics that function towards repeating the same (St. Pierre et al., 2016). For example, drawing has been conceived as an expression of the cogito, whereby the act of rendering something graphically that exists in the world is also understood as a process that must be delivered with representational clarity. Such clarity is accomplished through processes of refined observation, technique, and gestural control. This image of drawing continues to shape drawing pedagogies today. It measures children and their drawings against an either/or logic, which unequivocally conceives them as underdeveloped embodiments of such mastery. This makes some versions of drawing (e.g. realism) and humanity (e.g. adulthood) more valuable than others. Posthumanist and new materialist approaches to childhood drawing introduce concepts like sense, sensation, assemblage, event, material-discursive enactments, and others that attest for “matter’s debt to the vital forces of ideality” (MacLure,

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2021, p. 503) (see also Grosz, 2017). Such concepts help to flatten the divides of body/mind, matter/thought, subject/object, binaries which perform at the centre of a humanist logic, making it possible to continually situate children in positions of ontological and epistemic injustice where they are understood and constituted as less capable artists (Murris, 2016). Another important onto-epistemic assumption in the study of children’s drawing that posthumanist new materialism puts under scrutiny is the consideration that narratives of drawing events can re-present (Murris, 2016) those events. What this assumption involves is the idea that the knowledge of these drawings is dependent on its expression in language, and of what can be clearly spoken and said about them (Malone et al., 2021). It is an assumption that both produces and perpetuates ontological and epistemic injustices in which the relation of adult–child is asymmetrically constructed. The adult is thus reaffirmed in the role of translator and selector of what is important in children’s drawings in terms of development, cognition, and social relations (e.g. Haywarth, 2013). A reality that speaks of an enduring prejudice against children and their perceived capacities to communicate with credibility about what is important to them, and to act as witnesses of their own experiences (Murris, 2016). Posthumanist new materialisms do not address drawings as phenomena dependent on their linguistic capture. Through their connections with Deleuzian philosophy, posthumanist new materialisms foreground how in artistic expression and play, language functions not to communicate or to generate meaning, but to hold together rhythmically “unfamiliar objects, multisensory affects, movements, facial expressions, and utterances” (MacLure, 2016, p. 178) that create expressive territories. Similarly, children’s drawings carry significant elements that are obscure and that resist narrative capture (Knight, 2013). For researchers and educators working with an interest in the ethics of relation and social justice, considering the force of the material and more-than-human is not only important but urgent. Material forces shape how children experience places, situations, and relations in which drawing takes place, creating senses of belonging and exclusion, valuation, and debilitation (Murris, 2016). In what follows, we return to the two critiques outlined above, drawing as projection of an ideal, and language as an expression of human rationality. We do this in further detail and in connection with cases of specific drawing events in order to outline further possibilities for thinking the event of drawing through non-binary logics and with new concepts such as immanence, correspondence, vitalism, assemblage, matters of concern, matter-imaginings, and ontological indeterminacy. We do this, in part, to begin the process of fashioning new images of thought in the study of children’s drawing, which we hope continues to speak with care to the contexts and experiences of children’s lives, but in this case “beyond human-centric ways of knowing and being” (Malone et al., 2021, p. viii).

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1.5 Drawing as Immanent and Multisensory One way to begin the process of figuring a new image of thought is by thinking of children’s drawing practices beyond hylomorphism. As Ingold (2013) explains, hylomorphism relates to idealist philosophies of form. It approaches processes of making hierarchically by understanding that the creation of form is a structured, step-by-step process of reflecting a pre-existing idea (see also Atkinson in this volume). The artist carries the agency to master and (trans)form the material, while the material is perceived as inert, passively waiting for the artist’s gesture. In the case of drawing, Ingold (2013) has described hylomorphism as a belief not uncommon among designers, art historians, and cultural anthropologists. He writes: …the essence of a drawing lies in the projection onto the page of interior mental pictures. They would have us suppose that in drawing an object, the draughtsman would first obtain an image in his mind, by way of intromission of light through the eye, fix it in visual memory and then, in a reverse moment of extromission would shine the image into the page. (Ingold, 2013, p. 127)

Nonetheless, making could be conceived through a different ontology that Ingold (2013) calls correspondence. Through correspondence, both human action and material action act upon each other. Materials, the ones children use to produce a drawing, but also the materiality in the larger ecology of the places where drawing occurs (Schulte, 2019), are not inert but have agency too. Materials flow, resist, mould, wet, blur, and, and, and,… Children and materials mutually correspond in processes of incipient thought that generate form(s) (see also Manning, 2009; Hill & Lyons, in this volume; Kind, 2018, in this volume; Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2017). In the more specific case of drawing, this correspondence exists between the hand, as it moves, and the line, as it creates different qualities on the paper and in relation to other marks. The mutually constituting relation hand-line flows as an immanent process of thinking and telling with lines, in which the line moves as much as it is moved (Bryson, 2003). Artist William Kentridge (in Kentridge & Moris, 2017) emphasizes drawing’s immanence when describing his own process: The drawing becomes a halfway point, a membrane between you and the world. There is something out there in the world -the real world exists- and then that something comes here, and then it is a mixture of some things in our heads, of what I’m seeing or what you are imagining. That is vital to the activity of drawing, this constant to-ing and fro-ing between the mark as it emerges and my hand as it’s drawing, my eye as it’s looking or your eye as you’re viewing. (Kentridge & Moris, 2017, pp. 41–43)

The understanding of drawing as a projection of thought (hylomorphism) is fully embedded in the constitution of the modern world through what Jay (1988) calls perspectivism, “the hegemonic visual model of the modern era” (p. 67). Perspectivism mixes notions of perspective in the visual arts with Cartesian ideas of subjective rationality. It connects naturalistic observation to scientific knowledge, delivering a conception of the world as transparent, uniform, and objective and of the eye as a centred point that can translate the world’s three-dimensionality and heterogeneity in the flat surface of the drawing. As Bryson (1983) has noted, the logic of perspectivism,

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what he calls the gaze, is to contemplate the world from “a vantage point outside the mobility of phenomena” (p. 94). Differing from this, modern and contemporary artists when reflecting on their drawing experiences seem to characterize drawing as a kinaesthetic and multisensory experience rather than a exclusively ocular-centric process (e.g. Kovats, 2014; Maslen & Southern, 2011; Phillipson, 2015) (see also Trafí-Prats in this volume). For example, Barbara Hepworth is credited for affirming that “I merely draw what I see. I draw what I feel in my body” (in Malsen & Southern, 2011, p. 20). Exercises in drawing that foreground the sight-body entanglement disrupt the binary of mind–body that is at the centre of perspectivism. Such exercises seek to complexify what is to see and make things visible, by showing that sight and gesture, sight and touch intermingle in practices of rendering things visible through drawing. They make explicit that seeing is not just about vision but about conditions of palpability that concern both body and environment. This could be experimented in exercises that are often practiced in art foundation courses as the creation of blind-contours, where the person draws something that she observes but without ever looking at the paper, or the creation of touch drawings in which the person draws marks with one hand that echo the felt qualities and textures of an object touched with the other hand. However, while these exercises could be particularly important in older children and adults, as MacLure (2016) argues, younger children are polymorphous and have not yet been disciplined in the logics of grammaticality and representation that conceive drawing as the projection of an idea. Consequently, it makes little sense to engage them in exercises dedicated to undoing the workings of the gaze. As the chapters by Hill and Lions, Kind, McClure-Sweeny, and Wheatly and Clements in this volume demonstrate, younger children feel at home engaging in drawing practices that are deeply embodied and emplaced, making drawing a more-than-human event that emerges entangled with other modalities of expression such as walking, sounding, building, strawing, etc. Their drawings do not reflect a perspectivist logic but one centred instead on sensation. They require study approaches that reconceptualize the relation of sensation, movement, and world “as one of entanglement” (MacRae & MacLure, 2021, p. 265) avoiding a rationalization of sensuous knowledge as a stage to be overcome in favour of more disembodied modes of representation (MacRae, 2019; MacRae & MacLure, 2021).

1.6 A Vitalist Approach to Participation in Drawing Events For a new image of thought in children’s drawings to exist, it seems important too that we cultivate encounters with children’s drawings that as Hill and Lyons in this volume note, let go of the assumption that drawings can be translated into communication and understood as a transmission of coherent and linear meaning. In our work as art educators, we periodically visit early years classrooms and throughout our careers we have not ceased encountering children’s drawings that have been annotated by adults. These annotations include direct quotes of children’s utterances about their

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drawings and sometimes words that translate what is in the drawing. Frequently, these words are extracted from children in situations where the adult confronted with the drawn artefact asks questions to the child, who is prompted to report back on their drawing. Schulte (2016) problematizes the role of the adult entering drawing events with the assumption that drawings have background stories. He notes how in carrying such an assumption the adults can implant an ontological injustice in which the child needs to explain against “the habitual practices in which one establishes ‘this is who I am’” (Davies, 2014, p. 21; cited by Schulte, 2016, p. 141). Early childhood studies have problematized that young children’s participation in culture depends on their ability to express themselves in language and have developed the concept of a pedagogy of listening (Rinaldi, 2001). In such an approach, different forms of expression (song, drawing, movement, etc.) are conceived as different languages, through which children are perceived as knowledgeable participants carrying important cultural insights. While a pedagogy of listening supersedes rendering children as less-than adults, it does not necessarily interrogate the link between language and its association to human subjectivity and agency. Scholars who draw on the work of posthumanist new materialisms have conceptualized alternative perspectives on listening (Davies, 2014; Gallagher et. al. 2018; Murris, 2016) and voice (Mazzei & Jackson, 2017) that embed language in materiality and embodiment, connecting it with more-than-human forces (Hackett, 2021; Hackett et al., 2020; MacLure, 2016). In turn, this makes listening to children a practice of thinking and feeling with difference (Murris, 2016), rather than a practice of evaluating and interpreting the child (Davies, 2014). To further consider how participation in drawing events is driven by material vitality, we propose to think with a painting event on Seurat’s pointillism observed and discussed by Park (2021) in the article “Big hands and big black dots: Dissensual politics in the kindergarten.” Park has an interest in the processes through which children activate their political subjectivities in ordinary but highly planned art projects in the classroom. Park follows a view of politics inspired by the philosophy of Jacques Rancière (2013) and his concept of distribution of the sensible (partage du sensible). She ingeniously argues that when invited to paint small dots within the lines, two participating children deployed an act of dissensus, “voicing their challenging of the given rules of doing and being” (p. 17). The way the children engaged in the activity disrupted a distribution between art and politics in which the design of the activity assumed that the children’s “identit[ies] [are] empty operators” (p. 17) in generating a specific painting style. The children, Park (2021) writes, “divert from their given status and prove that they are capable of opposing reason with reason and giving their action a demonstrative form” (Rancière, 1995, p. 48) (p. 17). Park’s (2021) argumentation and analysis contributes to reinforce the importance of listening to children and recognizing them as onto-epistemic and political subjects. However, posthumanist new materialisms help us to deepen such understanding by interrogating how Rancière’s notion of dissensus continues entrapped on images of the subject (the child) as a rational and reflective being, hence reproducing a logocentric logic that assumes language to be epistemologically superior in making sense of the logos, the world. Contrarily, posthumanist new materialisms consider

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that disruptions such as this could be expressed through the excess connected to nonhuman vital forces. Such forces cannot be measured only by participative concepts such as voice or dialogue. Bennet (2010) echoes this sentiment, writing: When asked in public whether he thought that an animal or a plant or a drug or a (nonlinguistic) sound could disrupt the police order, Rancière said no: he did not want to extend the concept of the political that far; nonhumans do not qualify as participants in a demos; the disruption effect must be accompanied by the desire to engage in reasoned discourse. Despite this reply, I think that even against his will, so to speak, Rancière’s model contains inklings of and opportunities for a more (vital) materialist theory of democracy. Consider, for example, the way it imagines the being of the demos: not as a formed thing or fixed entity, but as an unruly activity of indeterminate wave of energy . . . This idea of force that traverses bodies without itself being one resonates with Spinoza’s conatus and Deleuze’s notion of (the motility of) intensities … Does not the protean “excess” that Rancière invokes flow through nonhuman bodies? (Bennet, 2010, p. 106)

Considering Bennet’s suggestion about extending Rancière’s concept of dissensus towards more vitalist directions, we suggest that the dissensus in the Seurat lesson is expressed not only by the voices and the conversation of the two children, that Park (2021) captures remarkably well, but for how their utterances hold together heterogeneous elements including materiality, intonation, gesture, relations of slowness and speed as they paint and talk, and so on (MacLure, 2016; see also Trafí-Prats in this volume). Most likely it is this heterogeneity that disrupts and makes the highly structured semiotics of the lesson become promiscuous. It is true that utterances such as “bad hands” and “big dots” as well as the rest of the children’s pronouncements are manifestations of this promiscuity, but so they are the painted dots, and body parts, as well as the tone of their voices, the back and forth rhythms between the two children, etc. Language, bodies, and materials are all in assemblage, interpenetrating one another. It is the incongruous assemblage that positions the language of the lesson to stutter and explode. Perhaps, thinking with Bennet’s (2010) thoughts on Rancière (1995), we can say that the dissensus, rather than being of the boys, emanated through the painting event whose excess traversed all the bodies, including the two boys, and others who participated in the painting, the teacher, and Park herself. As MacLure (2021) notes, when “drawn to the event by the strange force, [one] cannot stand fully outside or above” (p. 508). Envisioning children’s drawing through the more-than-human relationalities and vitalist politics of the event is important. It offers an alternative ontology through which we can consider children’s drawings as operating through a-personal, asignifying, and materialist semiotics (see Atkinson in this volume). It is through such drawing ontology that we can conceive alternative pedagogies of and with drawing that attend to resistant and dissensual acts and enact ontological and epistemic justice (Murris, 2016). These are pedagogies that work against a constant justification of drawing’s presence in early childhood for how it contributes to representational logics, for how mark-making stimulates the emergence of symbols (letters, numbers, shapes), how drawing is a window to children’s formation of schemas, or how drawing reproduces something that already exists in the world like pointillism.

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All these images of drawing continue entrapping children, teachers, and researchers in an anthropocentric, logocentric, and rationalist logic that repeats the same. Granting all this, one can argue that children’s political subjectivities will always carry the potential to dissent from the curriculum’s representational logic. Concurringly, it is important to recognize that not all children make art in contexts where teachers are open to ride the wave of the event’s creative force as is in the case of the Pointillism lesson related by Park (2021). In a representational ontoepistemology, children’s experiments and improvisations are always susceptible to being re-territorialized by curricular techniques, materials, values, and affects that can depress children’s subjectivities and expressions (see Schulte in this volume).

1.7 Drawings as Gatherings that Capacitate/Debilitate What children draw (the topics, themes, genres engaged in their drawings) have been a focus of attention with significant interest in the relationship of children’s drawings and their experiences of chaos, violence, and destruction (e.g. Denov & Shevell, 2021; Ribeiro & Silva, 2021; Rodriguez, 2018). Adultist gestures have tended to disregard such engagements as gruesome, characterizing them oftentimes as silly childish distractions (Thompson, 2021). However, some scholars have taken them seriously, and described these charged drawings as cases of myth making that allow children to grapple with questions of life and death (Wilson & Wilson, 2009). Similarly, some have discussed how the engagement with myths and fantasy gives children (and the adults living with them) the opportunity to shape their own ethical responsibility towards difficult knowledge emerging in social encounters (Edminston, 2008). Thinking drawing as an event that holds together language, body, and materiality in a dynamic assemblage brings our attention not to the world-makings of children, but to the ways in which children are already and always of/with the world (Barad, 2008), to how children are entangled in ongoing relational processes that pre-exist “any differentiation between learner, materials, bodies and so on” (Atkinson, 2018). In a posthumanist new materialist perspective there is not a child on one side and a myth to be engaged with on the other. Such separation brings our attention to independent entities rather than already existing relations. To think in terms of relational processes involves considering how drawing events occur in the middle of “(re)configurations of the world” (Atkinson, 2018, p. 32) that are not exclusively human but correspond to ongoing human and non-human processes that are neither linear nor causal. The entangled nature of the drawing event has been considered by Thompson (2015) in her article “Prosthetic imaginings and pedagogies of early childhood art,” where she wrangles with a drawing rendering a murder scene with much blood generated by chubby red markers pressing on paper. The drawing in question was cocreated by two children attending a Head Start program in Chicago. Thompson’s argumentative nuance travels long and deep to avoid a reading of the drawing as a mirror that represents something of these children’s lives, their social experiences, feelings,

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behaviour… She foregrounds the drawing in question as an event with a heterogeneous, dynamic, and shocking logic, what MacLure (2021) describes as the force of the event propelling thinking, questions, ramifications along with “explanatory insufficiency” (p. 508). Thompson (2015) affirms that Alexis and Teddy’s drawing shows a concern with violence, which is not the same to say that the drawing is a representation of violence or is violence. It is helpful here to ruminate with Latour’s (2004) differentiation between matters of fact and matters of concern. Matters of fact will see violence as a settled, undisputable object. In this case, and as Thompson (2015) notes, teachers in the Head Start program consider any allusion to violence bad, something to be completely fenced out from the classroom. As a settled object attached to negative moral values, violence can connect these children and their drawing to deficit narratives (Schulte, 2021). Divergently, matters of concern understand Alexis and Teddy’s drawing not as a fixed object but as an open thing, in which the issue of violence is not settled up. On the contrary, it has a webby-like quality that gathers together local events, popular culture, hauntings, behavioural expectations, the playfulness of sketchbooks, chubby markers’ affordances, friendship, the atmosphere of the classroom, how Latino children are perceived by non-Latino staff, curiosity, fear, urban inequalities, and, and, and. Matters of concern bear an approach to children’s drawings as for how they assemble with the world, which is the opposite of thinking that some concerns, like violence, do not pertain to children’s educational and creative experiences. A focus on matters of concern purveys children as multiplications, reverberations, and ramifications of worldly entanglements rather than subtractions of what they cannot say, draw, think, or muse on. In their assembling with the world, drawings gather too with philosophies, histories, geographies, biopolitics, and materialities that reaffirm or separate them from valued versions of the human (Puar, 2017; see also Schulte in this volume). An infamous drawing event from a few years ago (Quinn, 2016) can illuminate how the concerns that gather around drawings can debilitate and damage. This is the story of a Muslim four-year-old boy living in England, who one morning, while being in nursery, created a drawing of his father with a large knife and cucumbers (according to the mother’s representation of the drawing). When asked about the drawing, the boy pronounced “cucumber” in a way that the teacher heard “cooker bomb,” a type of DIY explosive popular among Internet pages associated with Islamic extremism and White nationalism. As a result, the nursery management decided to file a Prevent (Home Office, 2011) referral. Apparently, the drawing constituted compelling evidence of a potential situation of radicalization. A mundane and benign activity had become a life altering event, in which the parents saw themselves under the risk of losing their children to social services. It is a troubling example of how drawings are not closed objects, that they do not contain facts, but gather matters of concern that do things and make people do things. As Thompson (in this volume) affirms, drawings get children in trouble. For Barad, phenomena do not just happen, they are always co-created by the apparatus of their capture. This suggests that the phenomena of radicalization come to matter in the drawing not in a vacuum, but as co-created by the apparatus of the

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existing policies. It is the technical ethos with which early childhood policies are applied (Moss, 2014) that captures the child-drawing family as potentially being radicalized. These policies include literacy guidelines in which drawings should be treated as sites of emergent symbolization to be elucidated by the practitioner (DfE, 2012/2021); a pedagogy of phonics that privileges Standard English and does not encompass a diversity of accents including the accents of children speaking English as second language (Aitken & Beardmore, 2015); the assumption that four-year-olds should speak in coherent sentences when referring to past or present experiences (DfE, 2012/2021); the presumption that working-class and non-White mothers lack the knowledge to care for their own children (Allen, 2011), and, and, and. It is by the use and application of such policy frameworks that the drawing comes to matter under the light of radicalization. The policies compound in a way that other the child and his family and made them objects of state surveillance and debilitation. In the article published in The Guardian the boy’s mother is quoted, describing the event’s affective force: Initially I was so upset and distraught that I told him not to do any more drawings … God bless him, he said: ‘I won’t draw anything ... I’ll just draw a house, or the remote control. And I said: ‘Don’t draw the remote!’. (Quinn, 2016, np)

“Don’t draw the remote” speaks of how well the mother recognizes the power of a mundane object like the remote to potentially do unbearable things in the context of institutional childcare that are out of the boy’s control. As a drawing the remote can assemble with practices, policies, and materials in ways that debilitate and extract value from the boy and his family (Puar, 2017). There have been ongoing discussions in the history of the study of children’s drawing on how children create drawings in formal institutions, like schools, that are qualitatively different from the drawings they create on their own. Children seem to already know that some drawings will take unexpected trajectories and do things that they do not desire because such things can depress and debilitate their lives in such institutions.

1.8 Children Drawings’ Ontological Indeterminacy If drawings are things with uncertain and porous lineaments rather than settled objects, then maybe the study of children’s drawings should care more for engaging with drawings’ ontological indeterminacy (Barad, 2008) than to their transparency and readability. Living, thinking, and making with such ontological indeterminacy may require what MacLure (2021) describes as divinatory inquiry, a potential alternative to the representationalist inquiry methods dominantly applied to the study of children’s drawing. Divination is a form of inquiry that precisely attends to things that are not settled but immanent, that are not just solid but made of forces, intensities, relata and that resist “transcendental relations and categorical reason” (p. 502). MacLure affirms

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that such gatherings can be sensed “but can never be fully comprehended or represented” (p. 502). Divinatory inquiry (we can call it immanent inquiry too), follows the contours of things, how they contract, expand, tense, permeate, blend, similar to the work alchemists, metalsmiths, and wool carders do with materials. It is an inquiry that attunes and follows “conditions of mutation and perversion” (p. 506) and how these could become avenues “for new knowledge or prospects for action” (p. 506). The image of following the contours of things, brings us to consider children’s drawings as matter-imaginings or what Barad (2015) describes as matter being “promiscuous and inventive in its agential wanderings: one might even say, imaginative” (Barad, 2015, p. 387). A provocation that seems to resonate well with how Knight (2013) has reconceptualized imagining in children’s drawing. Knight notes how for Deleuze (1990) “the imaginary does not exist in its own right” (p. 66) but as “a crystallization, physical, chemical, or psychical” (p. 66). In this case, Deleuze is thinking about cinema, and how in cinema images are always in relation and reaction to previous and following images, in an open “circuit of exchanges” (p. 66) that constitute the imaginary. Knight (2013) utilizes Deleuze’s concept of the imaginary to question the tendency in the study of children’s drawing to characterize the work of the imagination in a developmental fashion as children repeating “schematic or iconic marks at a certain point of their maturation” (p. 255). Knight instead proposes that drawings are contingent and reactive to what is occurring in the milieu, “physically through materials, environment, body function, and metaphysically through thoughts and mood” (p. 255). The case of a drawing event concerning Laura’s daughter, Ingrid, can help us extend the discussion around the ontological indeterminacy of drawings and how to follow and think with such indeterminacy. Laura, who has the practice of writing short jottings of events in the life of her daughter, wrote this at the time: The last project that Ingrid has worked on at the Lynden Sculpture Garden Open Studio followed the provocation of using a combination of materials that Mr. Jeremy (the lead artist-educator) had situated in different stations available to the children. At pick up time, Ingrid chose to speak publicly to the group of children and parents gathered around the tables about “her project”: “It is a spider with [short pause] seven legs because I believe she has lost one. No wait, I forgot I found it. Yes, a spider with eight legs. I wanted to build a web in clay, but it came out being too small for the spider. So, I drew it. I put all these flies because [short pause], because a spider has to eat”. Later at home, I asked her: – Ingrid, why did you choose to make a spider? – I started doing pieces of pizza bread and pie, and I just found that one turned into a spider (Fig. 1.2).

With its turns and twists from seven to eight legs, from pizza bread to pizza pie to spider, from the building in clay to the drawing on paper of a spiderweb, this clay-drawing event reverberates with immanence and vitality. In it we see Ingrid not as a sovereign individual making her art project, but as a fluctuating body in a field of relations, where the drawing of the spider web emerges under the influence of

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Fig. 1.2 Ingrid’s spider and spider web

a-personal forces (sensations) (Deleuze, 2003) in reconfigurings of matter (Barad, 2008, 2015). Ingrid’s narrative of the event reveals how the agential wanderings of hands un/pressing, un/rolling, un/folding, cutting/joining clay as pizza-bread-piespider, constitute not parts (she calls them “pieces”), but a relational intra-active phenomenon. The pizza-bread-pie-spider is a “phenomenon … whose pattern of differentiatingentangling may not be recognized but it is indeed re-membered” (Barad, 2015, p. 406, emphasis added). Like the Deleuzian (1990) imaginary, evoked by Knight (2013), that it is made of images connecting and reacting to other images, this remembering of pizza-bread-pie-spider is neither a process of remembering as re-calling or summoning an image, nor is the conscious recognition of something. As Barad writes,

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Rather, it is a matter of re-membering, of tracing entanglements, responding to yearnings for connection, materialized into fields of longing/belonging, of regenerating what never was but might yet have been. (Barad, 2015, p. 407)

Ingrid’s answer to Laura’s question, “why did you choose to make a spider?” induces one of these responsive moments of tracing entanglements that differentiateentangle; a moment that came as she iteratively un/pressed, un/rolled, un/folded, cut/joined clay. Ingrid answered, “I started doing pieces of pizza bread and pie, and I just found that one turned into a spider.” Ingrid’s response to the turning of one piece into spider seems reminiscent of Deleuze’s (2003) characterization of painter Francis Bacon’s work as one of being responsive to passages of sensation where intermediary and ambiguous states carry the potential to yield something new. One can say that this being responsive to sensation somehow redoles too with MacLure’s divinatory inquiry, Deleuze’s/Knight’s circuit of exchanges, and Barad’s remembering as tracing entanglements. Like MacLure, Knight, and Barad, Deleuze does not present being responsive to sensation as a rational process of capture, but as an immanent going along with the flow of materiality, trying to divinate and join with transformative moments; something that he described with the term instinct. … instinct is the passage from one sensation to another, the search for the “best” sensation (not the most agreeable sensation, but the one that fills the flesh at a particular moment of its descent, contraction‚ dilation. (Deleuze, 2003, p. 40)

Was the spider the best sensation and Ingrid followed its contours? We cannot know this. But what we certainly notice in the utterance “one turned into a spider” is that this generative gesture moves through the uncertain pathway of sensation, composing disjunctive things together in an expressive territory (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), where everything else eventually holds together, the spiderweb, the flies, the loss and recovery of the legs, and the potentiality of infinite reconfigurings that all these seem to conjure. Perhaps, one of the commitments of a posthumanist new materialist study of children’s drawing is to value and attend more to these moments of exploration and wandering with(in) matter, where we can appreciate drawings not as projections of an idea but for how they mobilize “yearnings of connection” (Barad, 2015, p. 408) and ongoing processes of be-coming with. Under such perspective drawings seem to have quite a bit in common to the birthing of a lightning before it touches the earth. In a slow-motion video, a lightning manifests “a discontinuous exploration of different possible pathways... [an] electrical confusion... as if the electrons are trying out different paths, feeling out this desiring field, exploring entanglements of yearning…” (Barad, 2015, p. 408). The notion of matter forming desiring fields invites researchers and educators to value drawing as a fluid, formless, tentative, wandering creative force (Schulte, 2019). It suggests that children’s most visceral graphic experimentations exist along matter’s inventiveness, and its propensity to propagate in many potential pathways. It presents drawings as manifesting yearnings for connection with affects harvested in past events that remain vibrant and moving on the surface of children’s bodies.

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Fig. 1.3 Ingrid’s Daily #1 and Daily #2

Two dailies that Ingrid produced when she was 11, five years after the spider event, seem to connect well with this idea of matter wandering, propagating, and being formless (Fig. 1.3). Dailies are a type of drawing that Ingrid creates as a response to her father’s request for sharing moments of her day. They tend to feature a quick, fresh, almost visceral style. Developmental narratives could certainly characterize them as an example of unsophisticated schematism. However from a perspective that sees drawings as outlining desiring fields we can sense in these drawings the “activation and generation of new fields of re-membering” (Barad, 2015, p. 411). We see two events from the past that continue performing and propagating their affective force. Daily #1 re-members a game played by Ingrid and one of her friends, Daisy. Ingrid fills her mouth with water and Daisy has to say something that provokes Ingrid an irresistible desire to laugh. This leads to the spitting of the water that comes out as a relentless force, which creates in turn a surprising effect, and further enjoyment with the formation of exaggeratedly toothy smiles. Daily #2 re-members Ingrid on the second day of the first coronavirus lockdown. It expresses how boredom grows with the pass of time to unbearable levels. A calmed Ingrid gets progressively transformed, even deformed, by anger and frustration to a point that her facial traits are compositions of scribbles. It is as if the materiality of both events overflows graphically as “new ways of being in touch” (Barad, 2015, p. 410) with(in) the events. Both dailies render a sense of temporality along bodied and material (trans)formations that evoke a play with the indeterminacy that matter harvests. In contrast with how quickly laid lines are negatively valued by adults as poor work (Myers, 2019), these

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two drawings affirmatively operate as a diagram tracing assemblages of sensation, movement, and intra-action with the creative forces of the world (de Freitas, 2012; Knight, 2013; Atkinson in this volume). Children’s drawing has less and less space to be recognized for what it is and does for children (Thompson in this volume). Unlike domains like speaking, reading, writing, counting, or spatial thinking, drawing has neither grammar, nor a phonics, nor an arithmetic, nor a geometry that can systematize, and henceforth, pedagogize it. Drawings resist and refuse, composing rapidly on paper, sand, windows, and in the margins of a book. Their loose and unbridled nature get children in trouble, especially when drawings make an appearance in places, like school, where children’s deterritorializing forces are perceived as a problem (MacLure, 2016). Thus, a commitment to ride with drawings ontological indeterminacy seems ethically important to preserve minor spaces where more open-ended, experimental, non-representational gestures and material enactments let children explore who they are and who they may become with. We will only recognize the many possible matters that matter children’s drawings when we accept to live well with onto-epistemic uncertainty and orient towards potentiality rather than towards fixity and closure. This necessarily involves the recognition that drawings are assemblages that do things. They gather with percolating issues, affects, and concerns that can capacitate and debilitate children. In their sensuous, material, and kinaesthetic qualities, children’s drawings are also enactments of subversive semiotic-material effervescences (dissensus), they introduce difference in what it is known and accepted, bestowing new pathways of becoming, affect, thought, action, and relationality.

1.9 Directions and the Book’s Structure The book’s proposition of engaging children’s drawing with concepts inspired by posthuman new materialisms follows an already existing direction in the study of children’s drawing and children’s literacies. Current literature in these fields shows a growing interest in encountering drawing events with a refined attentiveness towards the situatedness of children’s drawings and how these connect with practical problems central to their lives (Kind, 2018 and in this volume; Olsson, 2009). There is an increased understanding of drawings as being embedded in more-thanhuman processes that point to the limits of thinking children’s drawings as a source of knowledge about the child. These studies bring into consideration the ethics of encounter in drawing events that render odd, strange, inexplicable, and wild scenes that resist to be known (Schulte, 2019). They also foreground issues of epistemic justice, calling for further recognition that children are experts on their own lives (Thompson, 2015). Other studies illuminate how drawing events emerge in the middle of complex and fascinating material-discursive entanglements between classroom materials, speed, idea(l)s of good kindergarten work, and Frozen (Myers, 2019). The vital force of such

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drawings can do things, like propelling children to discuss how the speed involved in doing Frozen (the character in the Disney feature film) does not allow the slowness and detail required in what teachers call good kindergarten work. Frozen drawings can do other things too, like bringing teachers to modify how times and materials are accessed and distributed in the classroom as to make children produce more good work, and less activity related to Frozen (Myers, 2019). Further scholarship has paid attention to how drawing experiments can amplify the capacity of a body to act and adults’ ability to recognize that children’s bodies do not need to be static to learn. On the contrary, innovative learning takes place by experimenting with the potential of what a body can do (Olsson, 2013). Finally, other studies have explored how the diversification of the materials and places where drawing happens can generate encounters that bring bodies out of the habit and the predictability connected to children’s school arts (Olsson et al., 2016) and shape new possibilities for movement and sensation through collective drawing practices (Trafí-Prats & Caton, 2020). In our desire to respond to the situatedness of children’s drawing practices, we have followed Deleuze’s insistence on taking an empirical phenomenon for what it is, the differences that it lays out, not for how it appears to us, the resemblances that it carries with established frameworks. Through his philosophical opus Deleuze proposed a series of concepts that thought the empirical field without making it dependent on human mediation. These concepts included sense, event, assemblage, singularity, multiplicity, immanence, plane of consistency, and others. He argued that only through such concepts a new image of thought could be developed in philosophy. We wondered what it would mean to think drawing events that we commonly assign to children without reference to the human. What concepts could we engage with to devise a new image of thought in relation to children’s drawing? By considering Deleuzian empiricism, along with posthumanist and new materialist philosophies we extended an invitation to a select group of scholars, educators, and artists engaged in children’s art and post-philosophies, so to consider children’s drawings through a relational, non-binarist, more-than-human ontology. We proposed three questions to incite, excite, and provoke their practice and writing: How does drawing matter and materialize the lives of children and the adults that work, draw, and live with them? How do philosophical frameworks like the new materialisms, new empiricisms, and posthumanisms transform the research, pedagogy, and understanding of the phenomenon of drawing as connected to children and childhood? How do the ecologies of practice where drawing events unfold operate pedagogically, aesthetically, and existentially? As such, the book is organized around four chapters, four visual essays, and an afterword. The logic of this organization is to explore the potential interaction between longer chapters interrogating and reinventing the study of children’s drawing with new concepts, and visual essays that delve into practice-based studies in the classroom, at home, in the studio, and the city. The visual essays present the peculiarity of experimenting with multimodal formats (photo, sound, video) that amplify the possibilities of imagining drawing as a more-than-human event entangled with bodies, materialities, and ecologies. In addition to the more habitual practices of

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visual documentation (Kind; McClure-Sweeney; Wheatley & Clements) one of the visual essays experiments with the generative and provocative relation of poetry and drawing (Hills & Lyons). We hope that the reader does not approach the extensive use of images as an example of surveillance that objectifies children while exacerbating the binary adult– child, in which the adult observes, assesses, writes, and children are observed, assessed, and written. In Kind, Wheatley and Clements and McClure-Sweeney’s visual essays as well as in Trafí-Prats’ chapter, the use of images does not constitute a mere practice of capture residing outside the event. On the contrary, the images are central to the materiality of the drawing events related in each of the mentioned studies, where processes of making images, looking and talking about them help articulating, eliciting, and giving further direction to ongoing, flowing, derivative phenomena. They serve as devices both for children and adults to provoke and analyse the transformative operations stirring the event’s force (Fuller & Weizman, 2021) and to sensitize the readers in its materially felt realities. All the contributions in the book are by artists, researchers, and educators who work in places located in the Western world. However, several of the sites backgrounded in chapters and visual essays concern postcolonial and precarious contexts that bring together children and adults with different material, cultural, economic, and neurodiverse backgrounds. For example, Schulte, Trafí-Prats, Clements, and Wheatly’s studies discuss encounters with non-White, non-normative, and Global Majority children accessing funded programs in underprivileged areas of the city. Children in these programs are perceived as being at risk of falling behind academically, emotionally, and socially. These children tend to be objectified and fixed in deficit narratives that the authors and their contributions actively seek to circunvent through new images of thought and new concepts. Having said this, our reviewers have rightly questioned that the book leaves vastly unexplored connections of children’s drawing to non-Western, Indigenous, and decolonial onto-epistemologies. This is true. More often than not, one book cannot do everything. Alternatively, we hope that our propositions for re-imaging and re-conceptualizing children’s drawing continue inciting, exciting, and provoking other researchers focused on unravelling and un/bridging connections, entanglements, and tensions between posthumanisms, process philosophies, and indigenous, decolonial onto-epistemologies. Arguments elaborated by the book’s chapters and visual essays have been cited and embedded in the arguments threaded through this introduction. As such we will not discuss them further and instead invite readers to use the book in the order and selection that stirs their curiosity and desire for differencing encounters with children’s drawing.

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Chapter 2

Are We There Yet?: In Search of Drawing Events in Early Childhood Christine Marmé Thompson

Abstract As this text emerges, art educators and early childhood educators find themselves in the midst of a significant paradigm shift in their thinking about children’s drawings, moving toward an understanding of drawing as an event that occurs as children bump up against the swirling influences of a particular moment in the production of their graphic texts. A substantial number of scholars in the past decade have gravitated toward perspectives that allow us to view children’s drawings as contingent, improvisational, emergent, and expansive. Encouraging us to think differently about the ways in which children’s drawing happens, this perspective prompts us to reconsider the significance of voluntary drawing in preschool classrooms. While many researchers concerned with the emergence of drawing in childhood have accepted this challenge, it is incumbent upon parents and teachers to see drawing differently and to reconsider its place in the education of young children. Creating classrooms where immediacy of experience and emergence of thought and affect move to center stage is an imperative for contemporary education. Keywords Drawing events · Early childhood · Voluntary drawing · Actual art We may not be the same person at the beginning of a learning encounter that we are at its end. As a propositional process, art practice has no essential meaning; it is a process of experimentation that can generate unanticipated new possibilities. We can witness this propositional sense of art practice in the practice of young children through to the work of adult practitioners. (Atkinson, 2018, p. 80)

C. M. Thompson (B) Penn State University, State College, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Trafí-Prats and C. M. Schulte (eds.), New Images of Thought in the Study of Childhood Drawing, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07143-0_2

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2.1 There You Go, Bear! My granddaughter, Ella, recently celebrated her third birthday. Birthdays loom large for Ella: In the months of confinement that she has experienced so far, courtesy of the COVID pandemic, she travels between two homes, her grandparents’ and her own, and spends her days in the company of adults, two cats, and for the past seven months, a baby sister Mia. During this time of isolation from other children and from many of the people, places, and pleasures that would otherwise punctuate her life, Ella’s days are improvised from novelties and repetitions. Among the activities she returns to often are what she has come to call “birthday drawings,” usually dedicated to our cat Velma or to Tawny Scrawny, a neighborhood stray whose daily migratory patterns we observe from our front window. Ella will announce that one or both of the kitties is having a birthday, that day or in the very near future, and ask for her sketchbook, “her” set of Prismacolor pencils, her cookieshaped pencil sharpener, and her collection of stickers (for birthday drawings are always also “sticker drawings”). She insists that I get out my black sketchbook and draw along as she works on the other side of the coffee table, just the right height for a tall three-year-old to stand and draw. Her drawings are a mixture of spirals and lines, multicolored, varied in density, identified with increasing frequency these days as playgrounds for the kitties or as confetti and streamers. Meanwhile she dictates what I should draw—the kittens, their guests, presents, a cake, streamers, confetti, and balloons. The walls of our home in quarantine are papered with these drawings: The space above the cats’ bowls is long since filled, and Ella searches for new spots to display her birthday drawings and the collages she makes to honor the exploits of Circle, Square, Triangle and (shapes with) No Names, who are characters in favorite books by Barnett and Klassen (2017, 2018, 2019). She also makes “big paintings” on sheets of kraft paper with paint crayons, telling me or her Grandfather, “We haven’t made a big painting in a long, long time.” While these were originally her own works, she has come to invite, or insist upon, collaborative drawing, first of Ferris wheels following a memorable night at Lincoln Park Zoo a year ago, now simply of marks to match her own. These are quite different from her smaller works, even from the chalk drawings that often surround our home to such an extent that our neighbors joke about the appearance of graffiti on the sidewalk. Even though the physicality of making these marks would seem to be similar, the settings, the materials, and the moments of making are distinct from one another. These are different experiences. Ella also loves to paint with watercolor, and has a kitchen drawer filled with paints and paper to support her interest. Like the birthday drawings, this is something she does with her grandparents, though in this case each of us works more independently. Ella clearly loves the qualities of paint as material and is selective in her choice of brushes and pigments. She loves to paint and repaint a papier maché rabbit

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purchased last spring and the dozens of salt dough ornaments she created for this year’s Christmas tree, each painted with great care. Often her paintings on paper are exploratory, as she talks primarily about colors and the mechanics of painting as she works. There are moments, however, when something clicks and the painting begins to suggest a story, to become a setting, to invite elaboration in a way that begins to include elements well beyond the tight circle of child, paint, brush, water, and paper. One morning, a small stone bear, a totem, joined us at the kitchen island where we paint. The bear said nothing to me, but Ella recognized his need for a home. She began to paint in blue, brown, and green, the colors of forests and caves seen in picture books, where creatures she has never encountered in real life inhabit spaces she has yet to experience. Finishing her painting, she declared, “There you go, bear. Here is your new home.” Ella’s art making is indistinguishable from Ella’s play. It is woven of strands of experience that float around her as Ella, paint, paper, water, markers, stickers, totems, high stools pulled up to kitchen counters, curious cats, memories, interests, and distractions come together in a moment. Read as a developmental milestone, we might see this as an instance where the naming of scribbling has moved to the middle of the process of making, guiding Ella’s subsequent actions once she decided to make a cave for the bear. Or we could see this in a more sociocultural vein, as a paint-and-paper-assisted conversation with her companions, whose encouragement led her to pursue her initial tentative plan to create a habitat for the small stone totem. Or we might see this as a convergence of things on Ella’s mind, her concerns about whether bears bite, her interest in secret caves, her reflections on the need for animals to have homes, and meditations channeled through her love of painting. Witnessing Ella’s emerging engagement with materials of all kinds, I am reminded daily of the improvisational, immanent and playful nature of art making, both as a bringing into being and as an assemblage composed of bits of experience, memory, and curiosities swept together in a specific moment. This is not the simple, single story offered by developmental theory (Thompson, 2021), nor is it captured fully by the alternative narratives of sociocultural theory (Dyson, 1986; Pearson, 2001; Wilson & Wilson, 1982b, 1984). As Atkinson (2018) suggests, events such as this are far more complicated than we once believed, involving convergences that are far less predictable and more dynamic than developmental theory would have us believe. Even when we acknowledge the influence of peers and teachers and materials on a drawing event as sociocultural theory urged us to do, we may fail to recognize the fluidity and intensities at work when children put pens or brushes to paper, the improvisational and emergent nature of their engagement. As Linda Knight (2013) points out, drawing for children is not a matter of selecting among an array of readymade solutions or schemas, but a matter of true invention, a distinctive moment of forces combining in ways that are constantly in flux and fundamentally unique: A child does not face a scene and then rummage through its brain for a predetermined schema to use to portray what it sees. The child becomes part of that assemblage of everything (grass, damp, light, raindrops, wind, ants, children), along with the tools, materials, seat, drawing board, atmosphere, other people, sounds. This connecting is undetermined until the point

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How might we conceive of children, drawing, and art education differently if we were to recognize this fluidity and intensity as belonging to the nature of art making? Understanding children’s drawing as we often seem to do, as a matter of learning skills and techniques associated with established cultural traditions, we minimize opportunities for children to exercise the freedom of choice and action that constitute artistic practice outside of schools. The matter is complex, of course: The regimentation and standardization that characterizes contemporary schooling does not yield gently to the inclusion of the arts, except perhaps as an antidote to the rigidity of days spent in ceaseless preparation for high stakes testing. But, it may be that forces even more insidious and intractable than governmental mandates and regulations shape children’s experience of art in schools and preschools. As children move from the freedom of drawing at home to the structure of art production in schools, they are forced to sacrifice the choices that we would otherwise recognize as the prerogatives of artists. Entry to formal schooling often marks a shift in the value placed on drawing and the provisions made for it (Anning, 2002; Einarsdotter et al., 2009; Richards, 2007; Rose et al., 2006). What may have been a largely child-initiated and independently pursued activity in preschool becomes more specifically structured in pursuit of curricular goals tied to the development of conventional literacies. It is not entirely surprising to find that children’s interest in drawing tends to wane in response to this radical change in approach (Richards, 2007). Children’s “free drawing” tends to be marginalized to such an extent that its persistence comes to be viewed as a disciplinary offense. In the chapter that follows, I consider the ways that drawing tends to be devalued in early childhood education, both by classroom teachers and by many art specialists. In their shared disdain for a certain type of drawing—arguably the one that is most valuable to children and most in sync with the processes of mature artists—teachers are notoriously intolerant of the drawings children make to please and inform themselves (Maitland, 1895). Drawing in school is too often treated as a distraction and an irritation. Perhaps because teachers consider it an attractive nuisance, there is often no provision-of time, space, or material-for drawing in the classroom. Drawing is seldom taught, even as a skill, and rarely encouraged as a conceptual or material practice. What does this curricular exclusion convey to children about themselves, their capacities, and their interests, about what drawing is and how it does (or does not) matter? What do we teach when we teach art?

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2.2 Drawings that Can Get a Kid in Trouble Me: How was art today? My six-year-old son: Not good. I had a dream about Super Eli saving the world but we just had to draw textures. Me: How did art education become something that discourages the making of actual art? (Purtee, 2-27-19, Teaching for Artistic Behaviour Facebook page)

In the United States, as elsewhere throughout the world, drawing is “misunderstood and underutilized in the primary school classroom” (Adoniou, 2014, p. 84); this neglect is evident in many early childhood settings as well. The problem is endemic, ranging from teachers’ uncertainty and reluctance to what Dennis Atkinson (2018) identifies as “a persistent under-valuing of the educational force of art in education by governments around the world” (p. 1). This neglect begins early, in the provisions made for art experience in the earliest years of childhood. It is manifested in everyday beliefs and practices: in art centers that are dusty with disuse, equipped with sad assortments of broken and depleted tools, without provision for collaborations or sustained explorations, apt to warrant little more than housekeeping responses: “Put it in your cubby.” These indifferent provisions are often accompanied by more organized art projects that constitute little more than assembly of parts to produce pre-ordained images, inspired by a sense that children who do not yet produce recognizable representations of the world in their drawings require “simplistic” and scaffolded approaches to making. These objects are referred to as art, and yet they bear little or no resemblance to the spontaneous art that children produce nor to the ways that mature artists proceed with their work (Efland, 1976; Wilson, 1974). What’s more, they fail to partake in the lively force of invention and adventure that characterizes true drawing events. Mary Renck Jalongo (2008) shares the story of a five-year-old child whose drawing of a pink fairy enchants all who witness the complex play surrounding its production in her doctor’s waiting room. Jalongo describes this event in contrast to the reaction of the same child’s Kindergarten teacher to her pursuit of a similar activity that diverts attention from the serious business of schooling. Jalongo attributes the teacher’s taciturn reaction to a pervasive ambivalence toward imagination in education as a field, and certainly there is a widespread feeling among educators that devalues the very things that children treasure, from personal fantasies to popular culture. Witness how frequently the latest manifestations of the ket aesthetic (Thompson, 2006), commercially produced or DIY, are banned, confiscated, and derided by the adults in charge. How often do we attempt to reassure children by telling them that the very things that captivate and fuel their imaginations are not real, of no concern, safely ignored? My primary focus as a researcher has been with a particular variety of children’s drawing, the type that they pursue “to please themselves,” as Maitland (1895) put it so long ago, the type most intimately related to the interests of individual children

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and, often, others in their cultural groups. Coincidentally, these are the type of drawings that are most likely to get a kid in trouble. These drawings are what Wilson (1974) identified as “play art,” and what Lark-Horovitz et al. (1978) described as “free or voluntary.” This self-initiated and self-directed drawing seems to be particularly compatible with communication of the complexities of children’s worlds, and exploration of alternative realities and amalgams of fact and fiction. These drawings are not romantic self-expressions, nor are they unexpurgated revelations of children’s minds. It is crucial to note, with Joseph Tobin (1995), that wise children know that not everything that concerns them will be welcomed in a public forum; the topics children choose to pursue in voluntary drawings are deftly edited for public display. Yet they are perhaps the closest that children come to experiencing choice in the subjects they represent and explore, the time they devote to the completion of drawings, the depth and breadth, and direction of their explorations. These are drawings that emerge in classrooms where provisions are made for children to choose to draw, and/or to determine the subject matter they pursue, and the media they employ. Undirected by adults, voluntary drawings appear in times officially sanctioned and set aside for the purpose, such as writing workshops or sketchbook sessions, though they may also crop up as “tatty little drawings on notebook paper” (Wilson, 1974, p. 9), part of the surreptitious counterculture of many elementary and secondary classrooms. The practice thrives in what Wilson (2007) describes as “third pedagogical sites,” spaces within the classroom where traditional structures of authority are subverted and children are, more or less, in charge. In most classrooms, third pedagogical sites feature interwoven experiences emerging in relatively quiet spaces, among children gathered around a table, each working on projects of their own devising while embedded in the richly social exchanges that occur around the drawing table (Pearson, 2001), subject to the contagion of good ideas and admirable drawing performances. Voluntary drawing opens up the possibilities of playful and open-ended explorations into the things that matter most to children, and, with that, the establishment of an often subversive subterranean counterculture in the classroom. I have embraced these drawings as reflections of children’s interests and experiences and documentation of the social life of classrooms, peer tutoring and collaboration, shared interests, and storytelling. More crucially, I have regarded the act of drawing together in these spaces of shared subjectivities (Zurmuehlen, 1990) as equal in importance and interest to the drawings children produce. I have seen this as a space where children and teachers sit together, where adults learn from and about children, where multiple dialogues occur, where talk, gestures and sound effects surround and punctuate and enable the making of marks on a page. There is a certain buzzing energy that surrounds drawing events when young children gather and draw to please themselves, and others, and (possibly) to impress their peers. Sanctioned spaces that emerge around sketchbooks and writing journals and other forms of choice-based drawing do not exclude adults, but invite their participation in dialogues initiated by children and their curiosities and preoccupations; their culture is made visible in the multimodal and performative events of drawing together. There is much there for adults to learn from children.

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Importantly, there is much more to drawing than what remains on paper, the thin residue of rich and varied performative events, artifacts unable to bear the weight of a century or more of research focused on their fragile surfaces. You have to be there— listening, looking, and lingering—to appreciate any drawing event in early childhood (Thompson, 2009). When children gather to draw together, as much or more occurs in the spaces between children (and interested adults and the space they inhabit and the experiences they bring to the table) as happens between any individual child and the page before them. “Drawing for children is not merely a social practice (Pearson, 2001) but a diffractive one as well, an event that affects and is affected by human and material worlds, both immediately present and vaguely or clearly remembered, elaborated and exchanged in talk, gesture and play” (Thompson, 2019, p. 148). However, after a brief period of ascendancy in earliest childhood, voluntary drawing tends to be cast aside in schools. Not only does the identification of such drawings as part of the prehistory of writing (Vygotsky, 1978) suggest that drawing is a scaffold that can safely be disassembled and discarded as soon as children learn to construct written texts; other largely unexamined biases enter in. There is skepticism about child-initiated content that by its very nature reflects the concerns of young children, presenting serious challenges to adult codes of propriety and opening the floor to discussions we would rather not entertain in the classroom. The obsessions that surface when children draw to please themselves are often far removed from the official curriculum. Such drawings, and writings, veer into worlds where fantasy and reality, sense and nonsense, walk hand in hand (Olsson, 2009). In a moment when accountability and standardization are imposed as curricular constraints, it is difficult for teachers to justify space for the fanciful, unpredictable, and exploratory worldmaking that occurs when children draw freely. Carnivalesque, messy and untamed, voluntary drawings often breach the limits of respectable classroom content. I believe that such drawings partake in the degrees of freedom that characterize art making, that provide space for what Melissa Purtee (2019) identified as “actual art.” It is possible, within the structures of schooling, to provide spaces for children to experience art fully, to see things “as if they could be otherwise,” in the words of John Dewey (1934).

2.3 How We Have Looked at Children’s Drawing in the Past At one time, the conventional wisdom about children’s drawing presented a clear developmental progression, from random to controlled marking, from conceptual to perceptual focus, and from schematic to realistic representation. This process was thought to unfold in a predictable manner, common to all children, providing a road map for the development of curriculum and a measure of the cognitive, emotional, physical, social, aesthetic, and creative growth of every child (Lowenfeld, 1957). This view was pervasive, and remains persuasive. Many of the most contemporary texts

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on children’s drawings designed for parents and teachers pay homage to the belief that children’s artistic development proceeds in stages, and a quick internet search reveals an immediate association between the term “child art” and developmental stages. For many years, the accuracy of this perspective was unquestioned. As Knight (2013) comments, “While understandings about world cultures have changed over time, modernist developmental thinking around children’s art and drawings has been much harder to shift” (p. 256). Developmental psychology retains its grip on much of early childhood education, but an increasing number of teachers and researchers find themselves engaged in unraveling its frayed edges (Sakr & Osgood, 2019; Schulte, 2021). Vanessa Clark (2012) ably deconstructs several of the assumptions guiding what is known as Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP), a term coined by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) in a well-intended effort to combat prematurely academic expectations in early childhood. Focusing on the views of art and the child embodied in DAP, Clark (2012) writes, “The child is therefore seen to act on the materials to translate already-formed ideas into matter. Through this conceptualization of art, materials and the nonhuman world are interpreted as passive tools to represent thinking” (p. 132). The aspects of DAP or developmentally informed art education that Clark describes demonstrate how persistent the beliefs surrounding a developmental understanding of child art are: We see an aesthetic standard that positions realistic drawing as better, more sophisticated, indicative of conceptual (and, often, emotional) maturity, a standard that immediately categorizes young children as deficient. And we see a view of the world that positions people as manipulators of an environment provided for their use, without consideration of the ways in which artists interact and intra-act with the tools and the environments in which they work. Traditional developmental understandings of the changes that occur over time in children’s drawings are grounded in a mania to categorize and tame and predict, to identify where children are and what they are striving to achieve, to shape our teaching to scaffold their progress, and provide what they lack in order to reach the next phase of development. There seem to be two logical responses to this situation on the part of interested adults, either to regard the process of developmental unfolding as inevitable and to treat it with benign neglect, or to intervene as judge and arbiter of the child’s desires.

2.4 The Necessity of the Sociocultural Perspective Beginning in earnest in the 1980s, doubtful and increasingly dissenting voices began to arise in opposition to this developmental paradigm. Wilson and Wilson (1982a, 1982b, 1984) drew attention to cultural variations and anomalies in the images produced by children growing up in different cultures, and to the distinction between drawings produced in school and at home. Eisner (1972) suggested that similarities of experience among children of a certain age accounted for similarities of approach

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to drawing. And the existence and importance of distinct styles and purposes for drawing were recognized and their distinctive requirements noted (Lark-Horovitz et al., 1978; Wilson & Wilson, 1982a). The emergence of sociocultural perspectives on children’s art making seems to have been a necessary move toward understanding children’s drawing as a social practice (Pearson, 2001), allowing us to shift our attention from the products of child art to the process of children drawing. Coming to see children’s drawings as events composed of talk, gestures, sound effects, glances around the room, interruptions, digressions, itchy noses, marker retrieval, paper smoothing, silent consideration, surveillance, snorts and wiggles, as lively lived experiences, was a critical move in thinking differently about drawing in early childhood. Understanding that the marks that remain on paper are merely the residue of an extended performative event allows us to understand that children drawing is, as Pearson (2001) alerted us, something very different from children’s drawings, a verb rather than a noun, a practice rather than a product. This revelation called for a radically different approach to research, one that is situated among children, inserting interested adults in the midst of drawing events, making them part of the ongoing action, rather than “expert judges,” sorting and resorting completed drawings to capture similarities and divergences. While the recognition that talk surrounds drawing events in early childhood lead to a shift of focus from product to process among art educators, the same phenomenon inspired a different response from language arts and literacy educators. Drawing was included more frequently in early childhood, explicitly in the service of generating ideas for writing. L.S. Vygotsky’s (1978) presentation of sociocultural theory and his description of the emergence of tool and symbol use in early childhood were particularly influential. Since the 1980s, Anne Haas Dyson has described early literacy practices grounded in sociocultural perspectives and attentive to children’s culture, both local and commercial, in ways that acknowledge the entanglements of various symbolic languages in young children’s texts. More recently, Dyson (2020) has expanded her definition of “composing” to symbolic activity in any representational system, and has come to refer to drawing and writing events as “graphic playgrounds”. Increasingly, she focuses on the neoliberal context in which the openended approaches to composing she favors stand out as exceptions to the constraints and rigidities of the official curriculum. Dyson recognizes an intimate connection among the activities that are commonly regarded as critical to young children’s sense of being in the world: dramatic play, talk, and drawing, chief among them. Her position is characterized by profoundly sociocultural beliefs: She is adamantly dedicated to documenting the emerging social life of classrooms and to the necessity of “studying children as located somebodies” (2013, p. 406). Acknowledging that her views place her at the margins of a field still stubbornly beholden to developmental theories (2013), Dyson recognizes that a similar situation exists in art education. She suggests that the movement from examination of documents produced by children to immersion within their ongoing social worlds, is still considered undesirable or unwarranted for those who continue to accept developmental thinking-as-usual. Leslie Rech Penn (2020) provides a clarifying short history of interest in the interconnections between early writing and

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drawing, tracing its evolution from the 1980s to the present. She identifies two distinctive strands of interest among language and literacy researchers and educators, those who “embraced drawing as a pedagogical rehearsal to engage young children in planning, generating, and illustrating story ideas” and others whose “semiotic interest in text, culture, and context” lead them to notions of multimodal literacies and children as symbol-weavers.

2.5 Drawing Events Among Dyson’s (1986) many contributions to thinking about young children’s multiple engagements with material and discursive communities and practices is her articulation of the concept of composing events. In her ongoing effort to capture the fluidity and diversity of young children’s work in their writing journals, Dyson defined such events inclusively, as everything that occurs between a child’s first selection of a marking instrument and the completion of an image and/or text, marked by a verbal declaration, physical departure, or a simple turn of the page. Marking off drawing events in this manner, she explicitly recognized how inextricably the social world of the classroom is entangled in children’s making. Drawing or composing events may leave their traces in one child’s journal or sketchbook or painted paper, but the events through which they come about are inevitably composed of multiple forces converging around and emanating from the lived experience of the child at work. Because these events incorporate multiple symbolic systems, practices still undifferentiated among young children themselves, they admit interested adults to the performative emergence of drawings, the composition of words, gestures, and sound effects that can be observed as readily as emerging marks on paper. In this sense, drawing in early childhood is almost always performative and eventful. This understanding is equally significant to teachers, parents, and researchers, to all interested adults. The nature of the event is a crucial element in the fluid philosophical constructions of Deleuze and Guattari (1987). They perceive events as emergent and ongoing, attached intricately to past experience and future directions, always in process but somehow concentrated in a way that lifts them out of their surroundings. Much like the distinction Dewey (1934) draws between everyday experience and those moments characterized by the focused intensity of an experience, Deleuze and Guattari understand events as moments when a constellation of forces converge: Moss (2019) describes this well as “moments when a bundle of intensities and forces come together and open up for movement and becoming, for affect and potential” (p. 114). Thus, children who arrive at school eager to resume a drawing abandoned days earlier or with plans hatched in the car on the way to school activate intensities and flows that have been building for some time. And those who settle in with a fresh page, a new marker, and a glance around the room also plunge into events ready to unfold in response to an unpredictable and emergent present. And sometimes, in such situations, little happens; energies diffuse and dissipate, and children wander off. As

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Deleuze suggests, “To the extent that events are actualized within us, they wait for us and invite us in” (2004, p. 169). Their occurrence cannot be predicted or planned. This understanding of drawing events as emergent processes, wholly dependent upon the convergence of random elements in particular moments, disqualifies much of what we practice in the name of art education from the designation of actual art. This is art without criteria, as Atkinson (2018) recognized; there is no rubric that can prescribe it, no lesson plan that can predict it. It depends entirely upon establishing conditions that allow such experiences to occur, or, at the very least, do not penalize those who welcome their emergence. The intensity of drawing events is often visible to onlookers. Maggie MacLure (2013) acknowledges how often researchers encounter “data that glows,” even as they review the notes and artifacts they have generated in their work alongside others. But this sense, that something is happening that commands our attention, this sense of wonder and surprise, also occurs as interested adults watch and listen to children drawing. Martin Buber (1947/2002) places surprise at the center of education, explaining that “a real lesson is neither a routine repetition nor a lesson whose findings the teacher knows before he [sic] starts, but one which develops in mutual surprise” (p. 241). As Kate Meyer-Drawe (1978) put it, this capability to be surprised by children alerts us that something intriguing is happening here. This vibration allows us to focus on events as they unfold, in a way that animates further thought (MacLure, 2013) and helps us to understand the absorption and intensities of drawing events. The sense that a particular drawing event is exceptionally charged with intensity for a particular child is often palpable as we witness a drawing in the making (Thompson, 2013). What is available here, to children and to interested adults, is a very different experience of drawing than is available in what Loris Malaguzzi termed the prophetic pedagogy (Cagliari et al., 2016) inscribed in lessons planned with predetermined outcomes and rubrics. In these third pedagogical sites (Wilson, 2007) where teachers and students share and exchange their typical roles and hierarchies, the process of drawing is unpredictable and adventurous. What Deleuze and Guattari (1987) described as lines of flight erupt as the improvisational possibilities of art making take hold. The conditions that invite such charged events to occur are subtle but significant. As Olsson (2009) suggests, even though children find opportunities to invent within the most strictly regimented spaces, where rigid lines prevail, they may find their initiative constrained within space where the lines are more “supple,” where the options available to them still set parameters and provide choice within boundaries, still leading to a predetermined goal. When ends are known and fixed ahead of time, as they are in most art teaching, room for invention and initiative arise in the cracks and fissures where children decide to pursue their own paths, to produce something new in the spaces between the rigidity of the lines provided by assignments and rubrics and expectations (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Olsson, 2009). But it is in what Deleuze and Guattari termed “smooth spaces,” what Wilson (2007) described as third pedagogical sites, that actual art is most likely to occur (see also Cornwall, 2021). In spaces such as writing workshops and sketchbook sessions and drawing in pediatric waiting rooms, we see children experiencing the freedom to

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invent, to respond to emerging thoughts and fleeting inspirations and atmospheric shifts. Here drawing is enmeshed in intensities and affect. Here children encounter “a surge of vitality, a feeling of being more alive, something that cannot be equated with or described in terms of categories of emotion” (Moss, 2019, p. 113). It is in these situations that children are apt to create their best work, the drawings that are keepers, the moments when children are excited to share both the process and the product of their making. McArdle et al. (2013) explain the difference between smooth and striated space in schools as a contrast between inquiry and innovation and established routines and plans and protocols. The smooth spaces that occur when children are provided the greatest degrees of freedom to explore their own interests, to pursue their own explorations, to collaborate and observe and intra-act with materials and people with whom they share space provide the conditions in which the unanticipated can emerge. Atkinson (2018) recognizes drawing, and art more broadly, as an immanent force leading incursions into the unexplored, opening up to what we cannot anticipate. This unpredictable adventure is the point of art making for children, the source of its appeal and urgency. Vanessa Clark (2012) describes the emergent assemblages that constitute artistic practice for people of all ages: “The artist can never know in advance what will become part of the assemblage. Mood, ideas, emotions, the room, lights, sounds, smells, people, and other materials all may connect with the artistic process. Each body has the potential to affect and be affected by the other bodies in different ways” (p. 203). The sketchbook sessions that I have documented in previous writings function as smooth spaces. In Deleuzian terms, drawings erupt and evolve as rhizomes, following paths that meander, detour, dead end, connect, and diverge throughout the process. The assemblage of experiential fragments and environmental influences that come together on and around the drawing page include the kid across the table who goes to your school and wears that hoodie every day and draws dinosaurs while roaring loudly and knocking over her chair when she is excited, and …and…and. These are not distractions, necessarily; they are the stuff of drawing in a social space, raw material working on the artist as the artist works on and with the material. Insofar as they become part of the drawing, part of the milieu, part of the child’s experience, they are invitations to think differently: “Something in the world forces us to think, and for Deleuze that something is the provocation arising from an encounter with difference” (Moss, 2019, p. 110). Linda Knight (2013) provides a Deleuzian perspective on children’s drawings, emphasizing the critical importance of the drawing event as a momentous convergence of forces: Children’s drawings should be thought of as mutable, the imagery in them dependent upon what is thought about and encountered at the moment the drawing begins rather than scanning their contents for evidence of schema that asserts the child has passed through some predetermined, scientifically sanctioned symbolic stages. For example, Deleuzian concepts of the imaginary serve to celebrate the spontaneity of children’s drawings and the blank surface in a physical (the paper/surface) and metaphysical (the prompt) sense rather than as accumulative tasks to be completed. Children’s drawings should be thought of as mysterious and abstract, and their meanings as sometimes closed to the gaze of the audience. (p. 257)

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The act of drawing brings a swirling amalgam of forces together in a particular moment. This assemblage of collaborators, human and material, might gather in the context of drawings made in response to assigned topics—often when a child diverges from the assignment to pursue their own more compelling interests—as what Deleuze called a “line of flight” in a tightly regulated or “striated space.” But voluntary drawing begins with the proposition that thought often emerges in shared spaces. The writing workshop, the sketchbook table, the choice-based center equipped with materials, have the potential to serve as smooth spaces, if adults can avoid the imposition of topics and time constraints.

2.6 Are We There Yet? One of the stories that my granddaughter currently loves most, and asks to be repeated at every meal and often in between, is the story of when Grandma and Grandpa and our cats, Velma and Muriel, “went to Richmond” in 2017 to spend the first year of our retirement teaching at Virginia Commonwealth University. She particularly loves the fictionalized part of the story when the cats bombard me with the incessant refrain, “Are we there yet?” as we share the six-hour drive to our temporary home. And just as the answer to their imaginary queries was always, “Not yet” (until it wasn’t), the question of how well we do, or can, understand children’s drawings is left in a similar position, hanging in midair. Schulte (2019) poses a similar question: “Is the field of art education ready to think about children’s drawing in ways that work against the seductiveness of the humanist frameworks, categories, classifications, and thematizations that currently define it?” (p. 92). He admits that despite our best efforts to characterize the complexity, contingency, and immediacy of drawing events and material encounters, even those dedicated to seeing children’s drawings differently struggle to extricate ourselves from the assumptions and expectations we bring to children when they are drawing. He asks, “For those who study children’s drawing, this is the challenge: How do we work against the feeling that we ought to know and that we can know a child’s drawing, and that we need to produce the child as a figure that is always recognizable and relatable to ourselves?” (94). Pondering the neglect of the more-than-human entanglements in children’s drawing, Schulte suggests that we are prone to ignore many elements in the assemblage that is constituted as a child draws: Indeed, drawing in childhood has always been shaped and socialized by the ideas and attitudes that the viewer brings to it (Leeds, 1989), acts of attention that inevitably constitute as wild certain materials and the situated relations they have to the child and to the broader arrangement of forces and agencies that exist in the surrounding environment. In many ways, the study of children’s drawing has always been—at least to some extent—about the exploration of the tension between what gets to be socialized as meaningful in children’s drawing and that which remains wild or is subjected to discourses that make it wild. (pp. 93– 94)

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As this text emerges, art educators and early childhood educators find ourselves in the midst of another paradigm shift in our thinking about children’s drawings, moving toward an understanding of drawing as an event that occurs as children bump up against the swirling influences of a particular moment in the production of their graphic texts. A substantial number of scholars in the past decade have gravitated toward perspectives that allow us to view children’s drawings as contingent, improvisational, emergent, and expansive. Encouraging us to think differently about the ways in which children’s drawing happens, this perspective prompts us to reconsider the significance of voluntary drawing in preschool classrooms. While many researchers concerned with the emergence of drawing in childhood have accepted this challenge, it is incumbent upon parents and teachers to see drawing differently and to reconsider its place in the education of young children. Creating classrooms where immediacy of experience and emergence of thought and affect move to center stage is an imperative for contemporary education. As Olsson (2009) suggests, “learning must be treated as impossible to predict, plan, supervise or evaluate according to predefined standards” (p. 117). We must ensure that we do not impose criteria, in the form of preconceptions and expectations, assignments and parameters, that actively inhibit the emergence of drawing events. As Vea Vecchi writes, “It is important to society that schools and we as teachers are clearly aware how much space we leave children for original thinking, without rushing to restrict it with predetermined schemes that define what is correct according to school culture” (2010, p. 138; original emphasis). Recognizing that learning occurs in relationship with the world and the human and non-human others who inhabit it reminds us that learning is relational, collaborative, involving, and affecting more than the individual learner, occurring within a community and as a result of our intra-actions with it (Davies, 2014; McClure, 2011; Moss, 2019; Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2017; Sunday, 2018). Leaving spaces for drawing to occur as an open-ended exploration of those forms of living will allow us to continue on our way.

References Adoniou, M. (2014). Drawing conclusions: What purpose do children’s drawings serve? Australian Art Education, 36(1), 84–104. Anning, A. (2002). Conversations around young children’s drawing: The impact of the beliefs of significant others at home and school. International Journal of Art & Design Education, 21(3), 197–208. Atkinson, D. (2018). Art, disobedience, and ethics: The adventure of pedagogy. Palgrave Macmillan. Barnett, M., & Klassen, J. (2017). Triangle. Candlewick Press. Barnett, M., & Klassen, J. (2018). Square. Candlewick Press. Barnett, M., & Klassen, J. (2019). Circle. Candlewick Press. Buber, M. (1947/2002). Between man and man. Routledge. Cagliari, P., Casteagnetti, M., Guidici, C., Rinaldi, C., & Moss, P. (Eds.). (2016). Loris Malaguzzi and the schools of Reggio Emilia: A selection of his writing and speeches, 1945–1993. Routledge. Clark, V. (2012). Becoming nomadic through experimental art making with children. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 13(2), 132–140.

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Cornwall, J. M. (2021). The “not-not” art of making “fuzz.” In H. Park & C. M. Schulte (Eds.), Visual arts with young children: Practices, pedagogies, and learning (pp. 24–32). Routledge. Davies, B. (2014). Listening to children: Being and becoming. Routledge. Deleuze, G. (2004). Anti-Oedipus. Continuum. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand Plateaus: On capitalism and schizophrenia M (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. Dewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. Perigee. Dyson, A. H. (1986). Transitions and tensions: Interrelationships between the drawing, talking and writing of young children. Research in the Teaching of English, 20(4), 379–409. Dyson, A. H. (2013). The case of the missing childhoods: Methodological notes for composing children in writing studies. Written Communication, 30(4), 399–427. Dyson, A. H. (2020). “This isn’t my real writing:” The fate of children’s agency in too-tight curricula. Theory into Practice, 39(2), 119–127. Efland, A. (1976). The school art style: A functional analysis. Studies in Art Education, 17(2), 37–44. Einarsdotter, J., Dockett, S., & Perry, B. (2009). Making meaning: Children’s perspectives expressed through drawing. Early Child Development and Care, 179(2), 217–232. Eisner, E. (1972). Educating artistic vision. Collier Macmillan. Jalongo, M. R. (2008). Foreword. In M. Narey (Ed.), Making meaning: Constructing multimodal perspectives of language, literacy, and learning through arts-based early childhood education (pp. vii–x). Springer. Knight, L. (2013). Not as it seems: Using Deleuzian concepts of the imaginary to rethink children’s drawings. Global Studies of Childhood, 3(3), 254–264. Lark-Horovtiz, B., Lewis, H. P., & Luca, M. (1978). Understanding children’s art for better teaching. Merrill. Lowenfeld, V. (1957). Creative and mental growth (3rd ed.). Macmillan. MacLure, M. (2013). The wonder of data. Critical Studies – Critical Methodologies, 13(4), 228–232. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708613487863 Maitland, L. (1895). What children draw to please themselves. Inland Educator, I, 77–81. McArdle, F., Knight, L., & Stratigos, T. (2013). Imagining social justice. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 14(4), 357–369. McClure, M. (2011). Child as totem: Redrressing the myth of inherent creativity in early childhood. Studies in Art Education, 52(2), 127–141. Meyer-Drawe, K. (1978). Kaleidoscope of experiences: The capability to be surprised by children. Phenomenology and Pedagogy, 4(3), 48–56. Moss, P. (2019). Alternative narratives in early childhood: An introduction to students and practitioners. Routledge. Olsson, L. M. (2009). Movement and experimentation in young children’s learning: Deleuze and Guattari in early childhood education. Routledge. Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., Kind, S., & Kocher, L. M. (2017). Encounters with materials in early childhood education. Routledge. Pearson, P. (2001). Towards a theory of children’s drawing as social practice. Studies in Art Education, 42(4), 348–365. Penn, L. R. (2020). Room for monsters and writers: Performativity in children’s classroom drawing. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 21(3), 208–223. Purtee, M. (2019). Facebook post, Teaching for Artistic Behavior page. Richards, R. D. (2007). Outdated relics on hallowed ground: Unearthing attitudes and beliefs about young children’s art. Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 32(4), 22–30. Rose, S. E., Jolley, R. P., & Burkitt, E. (2006). A review of children’s, teachers’ and parents’ influences on children’s drawing experiences. International Journal of Art & Design Education, 25(3), 341–349. Sakr, M., & Osgood, J. (Eds.). (2019). Postdevelopmental approaches to childhood art. Routledge.

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Schulte, C. M. (2019). Wild encounters: A more-than-human approach to children’s drawing. Studies in Art Education, 6(2), 92–102. Schulte, C. M. (2021). Childhood drawing: The making of a deficit aesthetic. Global Studies of Childhood, 11(1), 54–68. Sunday, K. (2018). When drawing proliferates: An onto-epistemological pedagogy of children’s drawing. Visual Arts Research, 44(2), 31–42. Thompson, C. M. (2006). The ket aesthetic: Visual culture in childhood. International Journal of Art Education, 10(22), 68–88. Thompson, C. M. (2009). Mira! Looking, listening, and lingering in research with children. Visual Arts Research, 35(1), 24–34. Thompson, C. M. (2013). Increasing the abundance of the world: Young children and their drawings. In F. McArdle & G. M. Boldt (Eds.). (pp. 88–105). Routledge. Thompson, C. M. (2019). Modest encounters and engaging surprises. In C. M. Schulte (Ed.), Ethics and research with young children (pp. 89–100). Bloomsbury. Thompson, C. M. (2021). Beyond the single story of childhood: Recognizing childism in art education practice. In H. Park & C. M. Schulte (Eds.), Visual arts with young children: Practices, pedagogies, and learning (pp. 159–168). Routledge. Tobin, J. (1995). The irony of self-expression. American Journal of Education, 103(3), 233–258. Vecchi, V. (2010). Art and creativity in Reggio Emilia: Exploring the role and potential of ateliers in early childhood education. Routledge. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher mental processes. (M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner, & E. Souberman, Eds.). Harvard University Press. Wilson, B. (1974). The superheroes of J.C. Holz: Plus an outline of a theory of child art. Art Education, 27(8), 2–9. Wilson, B. (2007). Art, visual culture, and child/adult collaborative images. Visual Arts Research, 33(2), 6–20. Wilson, M., & Wilson, B. (1982a). Teaching children to draw: A guide of parents and teachers. Davis. Wilson, M., & Wilson, B. (1982b). The case of the disappearing two-eyed profile: Or how little children influence the drawings of little children. Review of Research in Visual Arts Education, 8(1), 19–32. Wilson, B., & Wilson, M. (1984). Children’s drawings in Egypt: Cultural style acquisition as artistic development. Review of Research in Visual Arts Education, 10(1), 13–26. Zurmuehlen, M. (1990). Studio art: Praxis, symbol, presence. National Art Education Association.

Chapter 3

On Children’s and Students’ Drawing Practices: Advocating a Pedagogy of Taking-Care Dennis Atkinson

Abstract A common attitude to children’s drawings is to view them as practices of representation. This often assumes a prior world (imaginary or real) to be represented, a separation between drawer and drawing as well as between drawing as representation and whatever is being represented, or between signifier and signified. This attitude can be witnessed, for example within school assessment discourses or more generally when we look at and comment upon children’s drawings. This chapter seeks to problematize this representational approach, and its inherent dualisms, by arguing that drawing practices involve signifying semiotics but also, crucially, asignifying or affective semiotics that are not to be viewed as representational and when combined constitute existential assemblages that evolve through processes of territorialization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization leading to the production of new subjectivities, practice and world. Here there is no separation between drawer and drawing or signifier and signified nor is there assumed a prior world to be represented but rather events of reciprocal unfolding of self and world; a becoming of a subject-world. The chapter illustrates such processes of becoming through the invention of what Guattari, and Deleuze and Guattari call ‘ritornellos’ and the process defined by Gerlach as ‘vernacular mapping’. Attention is also given to assessment practices in art education which are explored through the idea of comparison as developed by Marylin Strathern. Keywords Children’s drawings · Deleuze and Guattari · Ritornello · Event · Diagram · Vernacular mapping · Art pedagogy · Art assessment · Pedagogy of care · Postplural

D. Atkinson (B) Goldsmiths University of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Trafí-Prats and C. M. Schulte (eds.), New Images of Thought in the Study of Childhood Drawing, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07143-0_3

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3.1 Introduction Children’s drawing practices are often understood as graphic practices of representation. This usually assumes an existing or imaginary world of objects, people, animals or events to be represented, an ontological separation between drawer and drawing as well as between drawing as representation and whatever is being represented, or we might say, between signifier and signified. This attitude can be witnessed, for example within school assessment discourses or more generally when we observe and comment upon children’s drawings. As representations drawings are produced through a combination of techniques and skills that constitute drawing practice and which determine the efficacy and quality of the drawing as representation. The problematics of adopting this approach to drawing practices are provided through a discussion of drawings produced by young children (6yrs) that I have discussed in previous studies (Atkinson, 2003). This chapter seeks to problematize this representational approach, and its inherent dualisms, by advocating that children’s drawing practices can be viewed as “childdrawing assemblages” out of which emerge “child” and “drawing”. These complex assemblages involve signifying semiotics but also, crucially, a-signifying semiotics, or semiotics of affect, that are not to be viewed as representational and when combined constitute existential processes of territorialization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization that lead to the production of new subjectivities, practices and world. There is no separation between drawer and drawing, or signifier and signified, nor is there assumed to be a prior world to be represented. It is not a case of a pre-constituted child producing a drawing but rather of machinic events of reciprocal unfolding of self and world; a becoming of a subject-world assemblage in the form of child-drawing assemblages. Such machinic assemblages are, as Jay Hetrick (2014) referring to Deleuze and Guattari (1988, p. 504), describes, “simultaneously an assemblage of bodies, of actions and passions, an intermingling of bodies reacting to one another and an assemblage of enunciation, of acts and statements, of incorporeal transformations attributed to bodies” (p. 57). I proceed to elaborate on such processes of becoming in children’s drawing practices through the invention of what Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze call “ritornellos” and the practice of “vernacular mapping” as proposed by Joe Gerlach (2010). Illustrations of early ritornellos from young children’s drawings are provided along with a discussion of a video of a child painting that I have discussed previously (Atkinson, 2011). The video captures a twenty-minute painting practice carried out by a young boy and is viewed as a complex and evolving child-painting assemblage involving signifying and a-signifying processes through which child and world emerge. Attention is then drawn to practices of assessment in art education through the notion of comparison as developed by Marylin Strathern (2004) and explored further by Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen (2017). The task is not to work with what we might call a pluralist idea of comparison through which a plurality of drawings are assessed according to selected criteria that function as transcendent arbiters, but to employ a concept of “internal” comparison or differentiation (what Strathern

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calls postplural comparison) that reveals what we might call uncommon features of a drawing, emerging in the contingencies of pedagogic moments, and which may act towards capacities for transformation. It is not a case therefore of adopting categories (assessment criteria) through which practices are compared and which effects an idea of similarity but of adopting an idea of comparison that begins with that which is “other”. Alice Street and Jacob Copeman (2013) capture Strathern’s notion of comparison: “For Strathern […] comparison does not depend upon similarity—neither the object analysed nor the theoretical frame used to analyse it need to remain stable. Instead she works to “recombine knowledge originating elsewhere” (p. 18). To put this in other terms, this is a little bit like being confronted with an otherness emerging in the practice of a child or student that forces a kind of affective and intellectual confrontation with the limitations of our established frameworks. This disposition does not efface pluralist attitudes and what we might call their vertical/hierarchical relations but instead extends the possibility of making connections with “other” modes of practice and relations and their implicit modes of creativity and, by implication, developing other modes of pedagogical relations and their perspectives that extend the pedagogical project. We might view this as both an ontological and epistemological project in that when we encounter drawings that seem to be outside the orbits of our understanding, they are viewed in relation to such orbits and therefore we might say that to negotiate the strangeness of a drawing involves a bifurcation that opens a gap between established modes of understanding and that which we encounter, a gap that may facilitate new conceptualizations of drawing practice and pedagogic practice. The pedagogical task therefore is one of taking-care, to be alert to such contingent and novel possibilities for expanding practice from within its immanent potentials. This would move assessment from being a practice that organizes or controls a plurality of data (drawings) through what we might call objective criteria to what, in the term used by Strathern, we might call a postplural form of assessment.

3.2 Opening Remarks and Questions: Developing a Pedagogy of Care In recent writing I have been working with the notion of disobedience as a primary force of art practice (Atkinson, 2018). The idea that a key aspect of art is to challenge or disrupt established orders of practice and in doing so open up possibilities for new subjectivations, new modes of practice and new worlds. In pedagogic work sometimes we experience children’s or students’ art practices that are difficult to understand, they lie beyond established grammars, semiotics or logics of practice and comprehension. In other words, although such processes are not, on the student’s or child’s behalf intentionally disobedient, they are disobedient to the pedagogical parameters of a teacher’s understanding. Children’s drawing practices is one domain of practice where this point was brought home to me. In this context we might view

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the event of disobedience for a teacher confronted by a child’s drawing that does not fit his or her parameters, engendering or precipitating, (but not always), a possible transformation of the learner and the teacher. An important contention therefore is that the “disobedient” form that confronts a teacher is immanent to the ethology and ecology of a student’s events of learning. And such events that might lead to the building of a life may not respond to established infrastructures of pedagogical practice because such infrastructures will “miss” that which precipitated the event. Let me try to give an illustration of what I mean here by referring to earlier inquiries (Atkinson, 2003) that considered drawings made by 6-year-old children who were discussing with their teacher the structure of trees as they observed them in their playground. Without going into the individual differences of each drawing’s semiotic forms, of the visual graphemes of each drawing, which are important and constitute value for the child, the first three drawings, although quite different could be said to depict what we might call a prototypical tree form in terms of our everyday visual experience of trees. An interpretation subject to the force of hylomorphism. The fourth drawing however seems to be disobedient to such prototypical views and yet if we think about the idea of structure that the children are asked to depict then we might see this drawing as legitimate, in that we can interpret the notion of structure according to a different logic, a different disposition, to that visual logic with which we interpret the other drawings. It is not a drawing depicting a view but perhaps we might see it as emerging from the child-tree-drawing relation as a different kind of assemblage. The hylomorphic logic used to interpret the first three drawings, variations on a prototypical view, (a kind of transcendent arbiter) can easily discard the relevance of the fourth drawing for its maker (Fig. 3.1). In much earlier developmental research on children’s drawing practices (Lowenfeld, 1947) there is an emphasis upon signifying semiotics, representation and generalized developmental patterns or schemas. Drawings are viewed essentially in representational terms: representations of objects, people, actions, animals and so on. Development is conceived as an incremental progress from scribble drawings to linear perspective, though many children or adults do not attain the latter. Variants on this model rooted within and informed by Western practices of visual representation adhere to signifying semiotics that emphasize the representational relation between a drawing (signifier) and what it represents or signifies (signified). Attention is given to the quality of the signifier in terms of its representational efficacy. Such semiotics tend to assume a separation between subject and object (drawer-drawing) as well as that between signifier and signified. Much of the school-based assessment of observational drawing still perpetuates such signifying semiotics and its inherent dualisms. These opening remarks point to fundamental political, ethical and aesthetic issues for pedagogic work, manifested in the task of responding with care to children’s drawing practices. How might we develop effective pedagogical strategies, pedagogies of “taking-care”, that allow us to acknowledge and embrace the existential singularities of practice within systems of education that are grounded upon homogenizing hylomorphic criteria? Put in other terms, how might we overcome the paradoxical relation of facilitating and encouraging differences of enunciation

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Fig. 3.1 Drawings of trees by four different children aged 6

(practice) and their subjectivations within frameworks of competencies that standardize and thus constitute subjects (learners, teachers) as subjects of established practice and knowledge? How do we square the paradoxical relation between existential difference and homogenization or norm-related criteria? Educational discourses often confront elements heterogeneous to their conceptual/practical infrastructures

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and conventions as suggested above in the tree drawings. These are ethico-political and aesthetic issues that raise the possibility of developing new positions to self, to others and to the world. Can pedagogic work that has become increasingly subject to cultures of audit grounded upon homogenizing notions such as competencies, standards, assessment criteria and so on, embrace ethico-aesthetic differentiation? More generally, within institutional sites such as schools, how, in the words of both Felix Guattari and Maurizio Lazzarato (Lazzarato, 2014, p. 249), do we create and practice both equality and ethical differentiation? More specific to the focus of this chapter, in pedagogic practice, how do we try to respond effectively to the diversity of child-drawing assemblages without reducing or occluding their expressive potency (for the child) through our established frameworks of understanding? At this point I might retrace my steps and put aside any notion of prototypicality or hylomorphic modelling in order to view each of the tree drawings mentioned above through Guattari and Deleuze’s notion of the ritornello. Ritornellos are concerned with initial processes of territorialization, of structuring a world through modes of expressivity that compose a becoming-with a world; the creation of manners that facilitate a capacity for practice. I will discuss this notion in more detail below. In each of the drawings discussed we might view their local graphic schemas and forms of composition as a territorializing process; an evolving aesthetic compositional holding together of a world, a holding that is always open to new or modified territorializings. The task then for the teacher is to try to become attuned to the worlding process of the ritornellos, the immanent infrastructurings or assemblage of each drawing—not to analyse “according to established pedagogical infrastructures” but to “compose with” or be attuned to how the process of worlding takes shape. I begin by considering the invention of ritornellos in composing a drawing and then move on to consider children’s drawings as practices of vernacular mapping. This will be followed by viewing children’s drawing as a practice that involves both signifying and a-signifying semiotics, a practice that is not concerned with representing a prior world but one in which both child and world emerge reciprocally. This will lead into a more general discussion concerning what might be viewed as a fundamental conflict or dissonance between the signifying semiotics and values of educational assessment in school art education (and other sites) that enact a comparison of practice by applying external abstractions (criteria), and the immanent asignifying or affective motors of art practice that impact directly upon local material flows of practice and effect potentials for signifying. Such a-signifying signs, as Felix Guattari envisioned, are capable of functioning “outside the rather narrow purview of the semiological; they are not open to interpretation (as through semiological analysis of their ‘meaning’) but operate to modulate the material conditions of interpretation” (Grossberg & Behrenshausen, 2016, p. 1008). For Deleuze and Guattari, semiosis denotes the signification of language and semantic content whereas semiotics (following C. S. Peirce) refers to a much more extended field of sign production including a semiotics of affect and mattering. This wider discussion of dissonance will therefore try to deal with ethical, political and aesthetic problematics within pedagogical work in the field of art education.

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The importance of invoking pedagogies of care, of taking-care, is thus a doublesided process in that pedagogic practice is charged with developing an openness to the multiplicity of children’s and students’ drawing practices but also a reflexivity of vigilance towards its established pedagogical infrastructures.

3.3 Ritornellos We are used to modes of thinking about drawing practices in substantive and representational terms: a child makes a drawing of a tree. An ontological separation is assumed between drawer, object and drawing. But in many areas of inquiry such as philosophy, science, the arts and humanities this mode of thought has been transformed by an emphasis upon process, connectivity and relationality and if we apply this emphasis to children’s drawing practices we might see that rather than consisting of an ontological separation, such practices involve ontological assemblages of material spatio-temporal processes, ongoing processes of territorialization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization of a drawing-drawer assemblage. Such assemblages are conceived as enunciative or expressive productions rather than representations. When we consider pedagogic work in terms of “subjects who experience” we tend to assume an already existing subject and a prior world that is experienced. If we switch register to flows of corporeal and incorporeal events that constitute experiencing then we are concerned with relations, connections and conjunctions and how these precipitate what we call subjects (teachers, learners,) and the world. In other words it is through such practices and events of practice that new subjectivations and new assemblages of practice emerge and this process is always incomplete. The French philosopher Michel Serres (2008) refers to the subject as a metastable process in that it is an “ongoing composition of forces and fluctuations, internal and external, that fringe its form” (p. 304). The notion of particular circumstance becomes highly relevant here, not as a background to, world, or a container for a subject but, in the words of McCormack (2017), as “an unformed spatiotemporal envelope whose shape is open” (p. 7), a cloud of conditions and possibilities from which change may emerge. What we might term the child-drawing assemblage can be conceived as a particular (existential) circumstantial shaping of internal and external forces that may not be recognizable within institutional forms of assessment, values or expectations. How does such shaping emerge? In an interview in the 1990s Deleuze stated that he thought the concept of the ritornello, from the word ritournelle, (translated into English as “refrain”), was one of his and Felix Guattari’s most important philosophical contributions. For Guattari, and also Deleuze, ritornellos consist of spatio-temporal configurations, little territorializations composed of diverse rhythms according to which we configure ourselves. The example of a child humming in the dark to give a sense of security in the midst of anxiety is provided by Guattari and Guattari and Deleuze to illustrate the spatiotemporalizing of a ritornello that creates a local zone of security and consistency. The spatio-temporality of this humming practice can thus be viewed as a phase or zone

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of subjectivation that affirms a sense of order and control in a troublesome phase of uncertainty. Deleuze and Guattari (1988) state: A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable center in the heart of chaos. Perhaps the child skips as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself is already a skip: it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is in danger of breaking apart at any moment. (p. 31)

Sauvagnargues (2016) suggests that this situation is composed of a number of rhythms that constitute a complex assemblage of subjectivation: rhythms of reassurance to alleviate anxiety and to confirm identity, genetic rhythms of psychic development, play and learning that constitute an emerging self, and finally, socializing and sensory-motor rhythms. This assemblage helps to create a home, a local territorializing process. We can witness ritornellos in the behaviour of some autistic children who develop what are called stimming motions and other forms of “repetitive” actions that help them to cope with anxiety. But such behaviours are not restricted to people on the autistic spectrum, many people employ repetitive actions, murmurings and other forms of expression when feeling anxious, uncertain or embarrassed. Ritornellos can take many forms according to the affects of different kinds of experiences. We can view early drawing or mark-making in a similar way as spatiotemporalizing processes through which young children experiment with modes of expression by developing sensory-motor and gestural rhythms, cognitive rhythms, noticing and consolidation rhythms and socializing rhythms. A drawing assemblage becomes a practice of inhabiting a world, a becoming-with a world, composed of different ritornellos and their respective rhythms. It does not presuppose a world which it then proceeds to represent, rather it creates or territorializes a world from surrounding social and physical milieus. A ritornello therefore constitutes an event of territorializing in a milieu through a mixture of physical, cognitive and affective rhythms. This practice of composing a territory from a surrounding milieu, the event of a ritornello, not only provides a feeling of stability but also involves a capacity or a platform for future change, to create new or modified existential territories. In the processual trials and tribulations of art practice, we might view the ritornello as constituted by rhythms of marks, gestures, movements, relations, sounds and touch, that emerge in the uncertainty, the unknowingness, of experimenting and facilitating a sense of transient stability, a territorializing, but also an opening to future potentialities. As the ritornello differentiates it changes relations and forms new existential territories that in turn remain open to the uncertainties of change. Each relational spatio-temporality, each practice or process of learning, can be viewed as a series of ritornellos and their respective local rhythms. Local compositions of practice; local assemblages that constitute an ecology of practice; where the productions of drawing practice for example (marks, gestures, etc.) form a centre, a co-centre, a cohabiting, a collaboration, a consistency, in the middle of experimenting; a process of individuation in a milieu where both change. It is not a process

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that is instigated by an individual self but one that functions on a number of levels, incorporeal and corporeal, in order to weave an ecology, to compose a dwelling. The ritornello constitutes not a site of origin but an ecology of becoming (This will be illustrated below in a discussion of a video of a child painting). In early drawing practices the process of experimenting with marks, rhythms and gestures constitute the formation of ritornellos that begin to mark out expressive existential territories, speculating germs that begin to structure a territory, vectors of territorialization and subjectivation to consolidate a self, as a “home”, a territory (Sauvagnargues, 2016, p. 133). If we consider early mark-making practices these consist of what appear to be random and haphazard lines, marks, shapes, etc., (often unfairly called “scribbles”) but the spatio-temporal events of such drawing processes involve synthesizing a series of disparate elements: marks, gestures, rhythms, materials, affects, cognitions, to constitute a territory of practice and becoming. In early drawing practices we can witness linear and rotational configurations constituting a series of explorations that involve correspondences, consistencies and consolidations (Ingold, 2013) between body movements, thoughts, feelings, motivations, materials (drawing implements, paper) and emerging marks. Such practices are open to nuances, variations and unpredictable happenings, that can lead to new or modified configurations. These practices are not hylomorphic, the imposition of form by the child, but constitute an assemblage of reciprocal becoming. It is from the emergence of these early graphic ritornellos and their rhythmic corporeal-affective and expressive charge that generate existential territories that new generations of ritornellos and their territorializings emerge. Such drawing assemblages involve both signifying semiotics and a-signifying semiotics composed of lines, contours, marks, as well as affective/intensive charges that do not function as representations but work directly upon material flows (Fig. 3.2).

3.4 Drawing as Vernacular Mapping My equation of drawing practices with Guattari’s notions of the ritornello and existential territories (cartographies) resonates with the connection that Joe Gerlach constructs between his notion of vernacular mapping and Guattari’s terms. Gerlach (2014), working in the domain of critical cartography, writes about maps, specifically “contours”, “lines” and “legends”, as well as the notion of vernacular mapping, where maps are not conceived as representations but more in terms of ontogenesis, as emergent processes involving semiotic and affective domains. What Gerlach writes about cartographic practices has, for me, direct implications for the ontogenesis of drawing practices viewed as emergent processes of becoming and territorialization as described above through the invention of ritornellos, existential rhythms of spatio-temporal practice. Gerlach is concerned with the “non-representational vectors” of different kinds of everyday cartographic practices that have emerged in recent years, particularly with the advent of new technologies, in contrast to the “representational certitude”

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Fig. 3.2 Examples of early mark-making practices

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of established cartographic practices (Gerlach, 2014). His aim, through the notion of vernacular mapping, is to draw attention to the multiplicity of mapping practices, their vibrant micropolitics that valorize difference in the production of new potentials and new worlds. My aim is to advocate a similar approach to children’s drawing practices which, rather than being viewed through frameworks of representation and their respective criteria, or competencies, can be viewed as an exploration and production of worlds, of adding more worlds to the world. Such a view when adopted in pedagogic work would then necessitate an ethics of taking-care and not immediately aligning a drawing practice to fixed standards of representation. Such an ethics takes care when approaching a drawing practice in order to respond commensurably to how it matters for the child. Drawings are therefore not to be viewed as renderings of a world but as processes that can invent worlds and thereby change the world. Drawing is not therefore concerned with aligning signifier to signified but about inventing new relationalities (correspondences, consistencies, consolidations) (Ingold, 2013) and valorizing difference in this enterprise. Drawings as vernacular mappings resist policing by established orders of representation. As Gerlach (2014) writes: Vernacular mappings are non-statist, extra-institutional, participatory, cartographic practices, either digital or analogue in their composition, in which such performances are not taken to be technologies of capture, but as techniques of addition; of adding to the riskiness of cartographic politics by proliferating yet more renders of the world. (p. 23)

This valorization of difference in the production of worlds and subjectivities is crucial, I would argue, for the task of pedagogic work when responding to how a drawing matters for a child/student in the situated specificities of the ontogenesis of drawing practice. How does this emphasis upon valorizing the ontogenesis of difference affect the practice of pedagogic work? What kind of pedagogic practice is required to respond effectively to such ontogenesis, particularly when we take into account the semiotic and affective (a-signifying) aspects of drawing practice? How do we respond or “take care” ethically, politically or aesthetically when drawing practice is viewed as a process of ontogenesis towards producing existential territories? Do such questions provoke a requirement to invent different kinds of pedagogic pathways for responding to local processes of ontogenesis, an ethics of constant attunement to emergent events and situations (McCormack, 2003)? These questions then focus on vernacular drawing practices as worlds and subjectivities in the making and we can extend Gerlach’s notion of vernacular mappings towards what Whatmore (2003) calls “vernacular ecologies” (see also Stengers, 2005a) to incorporate the territorializing process of ritornellos; where the drawerdrawing assemblage is constructed “in the immediacies of practice” involving actual and virtual domains. For pedagogic work operating with an ethics of taking-care the task is not to strictly subject these ecologies of practice to the molar capture or control by established frameworks of assessment that determine the efficacy of a drawing according to their criteria. Gerlach (2014) again provides a description of vernacular mapping that is apposite to local ecologies of drawing practice as inventive processes and the need for pedagogic work to take care:

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The notions of vulnerability, perturbation and navigating the world otherwise seem apposite to the existential uncertainties, vulnerabilities and explorations of early (or later) drawing practices and thus when considering the ethos of such practices it seems appropriate to adopt a speculative sensibility and pragmatism (Savransky, 2017, p. 32) to the semiotic and affective intensities of practice. We might view speculative pedagogies as those that function as a pragmatics of thought whereby thought invents a future when such a future, that of a child or student’s drawing practice demands thought and sensibility. To speculate is therefore to make a wager on the incompleteness or the uncertainties of the present based upon what confronts us, the material for speculation, a wager that detects a possibility for creative experimentation and transformation. We can extend the notion of ethos to that of a vernacular or an “etho” ecology (Stengers, 2005a, p. 187) and try to acknowledge the “insistence of the not-known” and how we respond to and inherit from such ecologies (assemblages) and their existential territories in pedagogic work. This point is central to Stengers’ (2005b) writing on the cosmopolitical proposal and the power of situations to affect and to provoke thought, to generate etho-ecological questions that emerge from such confrontations. Here the task is not to demand compliance (in the form of predetermined criteria) from that which we are confronted but, on the contrary, to create or invent the manners (concepts, sensibilities,) that will allow us to have a care for what confronts us. In pedagogic work this concerns a process of composing with others without imposing established orders; a process where the need to pay due attention is crucial. This entails an avoidance of discourses that close down existential enunciations and remains open to the affective forces and dispositions of local practices and their potentials.

3.5 Drawing Practices and A-Signifying Semiotics

QR Code Scan to view video of Luca painting Some years ago (Atkinson, 2011), I wrote about a video of a young boy engaged in making a painting, a process that occurred over about twenty minutes (scan QR

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code above to watch). I would like to return to this activity and view it through the ideas on ritornellos and existential territories as discussed above and then signifying and a-signifying semiotics that will be discussed below. The video depicts the boy passing through a series of actions and reflexive “conversations” with his actions and the emerging painting: the lines, colours, the changing scenarios being depicted. He is supported by his grandfather. The painting practice can be viewed as an assemblage functioning on different levels composed of a variety of components; a co-composing of elements reciprocally producing painter, painting and emerging worlds. This assemblage is not to be viewed as an aggregate of separate entities: child, painting, paintbrush, paper, paint but a reciprocal fusion driven by charges of affect (being affected and affecting) effecting expression, connections, conjunctions and cognition. The painting can be viewed as the production of changing and modulating existential spatio-temporal territories as the child-painting assemblage invents a windmill, a storm, a train crashing, in a continuous sequence of practice that involves action, speech, exclamations and affects. The ontogenesis of practice emerges spontaneously and contingently, nothing is pre-planned but everything occurs through an immediacy of engagement, affect, expression, action and cognition. By watching the video, it becomes quite clear that the boy is engaged with inventing assemblages of signifying semiotics: he creates a horizontal line whilst simultaneously shouting “Here comes a train”, then at the end of the line he makes a large smudge and cries “Dead end” and makes a crashing sound and says “Come back”. Then he retraces the line and repeats the action crying, “Here it comes again”, then “Watch dead end”. But these phases of painting are driven by a-signifying semiotics, that is to say, the affective and expressive intensities that drive the practice and operate directly on the material flows of practice, which, together with signifying practices carve out emerging and changing spatio-temporal territories that constitute the painting assemblage. A-signifying signs do not represent a prior reality but produce a reality not yet in existence, they are not concerned with representation or denotation, but with intensive forces of affect that work directly and rhythmically upon material flows of practice. Let me expand upon these ideas of signifying and a-signifying semiotics. In his texts Proust and Signs and Difference and Repetition, Deleuze argues that signs are sites of encounter, he does not adopt the more traditional structuralist notion of a sign whereby a signifier refers to its signified. As sites of encounter signs generate affective forces that challenge or unsettle accepted ways of understanding and therefore, for Deleuze (2008) such encounters involve learning, not in the more traditional sense of an accumulation and expansion of knowledge through established facts, but by a disturbance of such orders through the affect of encounter. As Iain Campbell (2019) writes: Learning, undergoing the apprenticeship in signs, is then a process of interpretation and explication, of rethinking and renewing how one perceives, understands, and engages with the world. […] Deleuze puts forward a conception of signs where the interpreter and their world are co-implicated. Signs do not merely tell us about what they signify but directly impinge on thought, force thought into a constructive act of interpretation that changes the form that thought itself takes. (Campbell, 2019, p. 354)

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This affective force of signs, (a-signifying, in that it does not involve representation but a direct impact upon material and incorporeal flows), can be viewed as constituting an existential encounter from which emerge subjects and objects. When we watch the boy painting we can observe little moments of encounter as he reacts to the outcomes of his painting, the marks and splodges he makes, deliberate and accidental, the encouraging comments from carers, (different signifying and a-signifying semiotic levels) which then seem to inform his next moves. Campbell (2019) writes again (see also Bogue, 2004): To learn is to constitute this space of an encounter with signs; in other words, to open ourselves to a disorienting, alien outside, to immerse ourselves in a problem, […] to place the relations that constitute our bodies into relation with the relations that constitute the problem, and to give consistency to the new field this then constitutes. (Campbell, 2019, p. 356)

The primary force of affect emerges in an encounter, a conjunction of the material and the incorporeal, in the sign that forces thought and action thereby constructing a new consistency to practice and its world. Can we detect this primary force and ongoing consistencies in the boy’s painting practice as he moves from episode to episode? This suggests a kind of homeorhesis (Waddington, 1972), that is, a metastability in the dynamic flows of practice; material and incorporeal flows. Learning can thus be viewed as a practice involving an ongoing resolution of “problematic fields” that through encounters, consisting of signifying and a-signifying semiotic flows, change the form of learning and, reciprocally, the world encountered. I will return to the relation between signs and learning towards the end of this chapter. Turning to Guattari. He took the autonomy and priority that Lacan attributed to the signifier over the signified as an opportunity to develop a more expansive exploration of sign functioning. He challenged the dominance of a single semiotic of signification, the signifier–signified relation that produces meaning, and he explored the “nonsignifying semiotic dimensions underlying, illuminating and deconstructing every discourse” (Guattari, 1984a, p. 104.). Guattari felt that by prioritizing signification, language or the symbolic, other important semiotic systems and forms of meaning are occluded such as a semiotics of the body, of power, of affect, of touch and more. With the notion of a-signifying or non-signifying semiotics Guattari points to those semiotic processes that do not involve representation or signification but that act directly upon material and incorporeal flows. In many ways, these a-signifying semiotic flows function prior to representation or signification but they are not to be viewed as referring to a pre-linguistic or pre-signifying state (see Campbell, 2019). It is through the notion of the diagram, taken from C. S. Peirce but developed by Guattari (and later with Deleuze), that we might understand this aspect of the status of a-signifying semiotics. Campbell (2019) writes that though Peirce maintains a representational or resemblance relation between a diagram and its object, which he discusses in terms of a sketch for a painting, Guattari (1984b) argues that whilst we might agree that a sketch bears a certain likeness to the painting that follows, it does not imitate it, but rather the sketch as diagram acts as a precursor to inventing something new that was not present in the diagram (Campbell, 2019). So for Guattari,

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the diagram does not function as a signification or representation but as a nonrepresentational affective motor or force to modulate material flows and thereby construct new relations and worlds. Campbell (2019) makes the point that both Deleuze’s idea of the sign as an encounter (event) and Guattari’s idea of the diagram as a force of becoming are “intensive theories of signs” (p. 364) that break free from representation and signifying semiotics and function as a kind of disruption to established orders of thought and practice and force us to think and act speculatively along new or modified lines. Campbell (2019), quoting Deleuze and Guattari, “Diagrams have a piloting role— they [do] not function to represent, even something real, but rather construct a real that is yet to come” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 142). We might see a link between Deleuze’s notion of encounter (the ontological aspect of signs as a confrontation with the not-yet-known) and the diagram (the speculative construction of something yet to come) as we consider the child’s painting assemblage that involves a series of a-signifying signs, lines, splodges, marks, that do not represent but underly the construction of a series of ongoing and evolving scenarios in which human and non-human elements form the painting assemblage. We might read these a-signifying signs as ritornellos that function as a “modulating, rhythmic assemblage which draws diverse semiotic practices into consistency” (Campbell, 2019, p. 253). Again, when watching the video of Luca’s painting we can read the painting assemblage as involving a series of marks, lines and splodges that come together to form a consistency, an existential cartography, that also holds potential for further mutation. This plane of consistency coupled with potentials for evolution brings into play the important onto-epistemological as well as ethico-political point made by Spinoza that we do not yet know what a body is capable of doing or what a mind is capable of thinking.

3.6 Institutional Legends and a Politics/Ethics of Difference and Care in Pedagogic Work The term legend is taken from cartography where it constitutes a key for decoding the symbolic features of a map, it lists the visual symbols contained in a map and gives their meaning. We can infer a similar function to assessment criteria or lists of competencies used in schools to evaluate drawings and other art practices and view these criteria as composing educational or pedagogical legends that provide a key for interpreting and assessing the quality and efficacy of children’s or students’ art practices. A legend on a map therefore refers to a specific, pre-existing territory as a static entity. What we are concerned with regarding children’s drawing practices viewed as the forming of existential territories (vernacular mappings and ecologies) are not pre-existing territories but the ontogenesis of assemblages and the continual affective/cognitive composing and generative unfolding of new worlds and new subjectivations. A similar dynamic is proposed with the idea of a pedagogy of

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taking-care. The problem with a fixed legend in pedagogic work is that such ontogenesis, its affective intensities and relations tend to be occluded by an emphasis upon established content and orders. The key point therefore, partly relating back to my earlier point about the double-sided aspect of a pedagogy of “taking-care”, is to set aside transcendent criteria as external scales that are employed as a common denominator to assess and compare the plurality of practices and to adopt what Strathern (2004) (see also, e.g. Holbraad & Pedersen, 2017) calls a postplural comparison in which unusual aspects that are immanent to each (drawing) practice are worked with in order to expand the child’s practice and, equally, to transform the teacher’s pedagogical practice. Such pedagogical ventures or adventures, rather than operating from established “external” criteria, recomplexify practice and in doing so open up possibilities for new directions and potentials. Such a disposition towards pedagogical practice could be considered in the words of Deleuze and Guattari (1988) as a pedagogic “war machine” that works to extend the boundaries of practice. We might ask how do legends of criteria take account of the affective or a-signifying dimensions of a child-drawing assemblage? Is this crucial aspect of drawing practice, what we might call its motor of becoming, acknowledged in assessment? Put in another way, is there an inevitable clash between the molar categories of assessment discourses and the local vernacular ecologies and existential territories of drawing practices? Do such questions raise important political and ethical issues for pedagogic work?

3.7 Pedagogical Practice and the Gift of Otherness In conclusion, I turn briefly to the work of the anthropologist Marylin Strathern, as discussed by Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen (2017). I consider Strathern’s work on relation, comparison and post-plurality and their implications for a pedagogy of taking-care. For Strathern, relation is not to be conceived as external to things, that is to say as existing between things, individuals, objects, etc., rather she posits that there are no “things” as such but only relations and different kinds of relations (Holbraad & Pedersen, 2017, p. 115). Furthermore Holbraad and Pedersen (2017) comment on what we might call the productive force or assumptions of the term relation as employed in ethnographic study. They state that for Strathern, “social relations do not exist in an external world out there, but are an intrinsic and inevitable effect of the manner in which anthropological analysis is conducted” (p. 116). They continue, quoting Strathern (1988), that, far from being an indigenous term adopted by ethnographers in the hope of ‘grasping the native’s point of view’ […] then, ‘the relation’ is a proxy by which ‘scholars trained in the Western tradition …through deliberate choice … glimpse what “other” assumptions might look like…through an internal dialogue within the confines of [their] own language. (Holbraad & Pedersen, 2017, p. 116; citing Strathern, 1988, p. 4)

The term relation therefore defines an experimental and heuristic approach to anthropological analysis. It involves a double articulation towards what we might call

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the object of study and equally towards the study’s conceptual framing; articulations that emerge from the contingencies of encounter and the linguistic traditions and inventions in which these are framed. Holbraad and Pedersen (2017) (see also, e.g. Strathern, 2018) state: Anthropologists do not study relations between the people they study, but the relations they need to ‘invent’ to study those people. For [Strathern] relations are not substantive in the sense of something that ‘is’, but contingent in the sense of something - an ethnographic moment that happens in the encounter between anthropology and its subject matter. (p. 120)

The implications of this notion of “relation” that is not to be conceived as representing an external reality but as an experimental and heuristic “technology of description” (Holbraad & Pedersen, 2017, p. 120) emerging in pedagogic moments for pedagogic inquiry will be discussed shortly. Before that, I move on to another related notion from Strathern (2004), dealt with in detail in her text Partial Connections, namely, the concept of comparison. Put very crudely for Strathern comparison is not a matter of comparing one thing with another according to some external arbiter, as when in a particular context of study we require a means by which we can bring a sense of order and sense to a plurality of practices we witness. How, for example, do we make sense of the diversity of practices…in our case the diversity of drawing practices…and bring a sense of order to these when required to do so, as, for example, in assessment practices? Historically within school art educational practices this has taken the form of employing the use of particular criteria to assess the quality and efficacy of a drawing, or other forms of art practice. To do this we might operate from established assessment criteria that in effect identify or pedagogize a drawing, and through such criteria establish a child’s or student’s drawing ability. Strathern calls such criteria “scales” in the sense that they constitute conceptual vectors and idioms used to convey information or knowledge. Such “assessments” could involve quantitative modes of “scaling” whereby we study in detail the properties of an individual drawing or study a large collection of drawings to gain an overview of what appear to be common graphic schema. In taking these options we feel that we are gaining some understanding of the drawings and their graphic forms. In other words, we might say that we are using selected criteria or “scalings” to scan the drawings in order to reduce complexity and invoke control over what we study. We must not lose sight of the point that the drawings are not understood “in themselves” but through the language and scalings of assessment in which the drawings are constructed. To repeat, this kind of comparison of drawings is premised on a plural metaphysic of a world composed of an infinity of entities that are given a form of control through an external arbiter so that differences exist between things (drawings). Strathern introduces the notion of a “postplural conception of the world” (2004, p. xvi), which abandons the pluralist idea of comparison by external measures. In order to try to grasp the concept of the postplural, Holbraad and Pedersen (2017) refer to the notion of abstraction. I will try to give a summary of how this term is developed by Holbraad and Pedersen in their exposition of Strathern’s concept of the postplural and then discuss the implications of this term for pedagogical practice.

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What would comparison mean in a world where there are no things understood as discrete beings or entities, but a world of relations, transitions and connections, what we might refer to after Deleuze and Guattari, a rhizomatic world? In a pluralist world abstraction refers to those arbiters or batteries of criteria (scales) that are more abstract than what is being compared (drawings or drawing practices) and which allow comparisons to be made. We might look at drawings from the abstract notions of texture, line, perspective or other neutral criteria that allow us to compare and assess the drawings. Such abstractions would appear to reduce the complexity and allow us to carry out the task of assessment when faced with a diverse range of graphic expressions. However, Holbraad and Pedersen state that: Whereas, on the plural imaginary, comparisons occur between different things, then, postplurally, they also take place within things, precisely because the postplural move is to treat everything – each and every thing in the world – as a comparison. (Holbraad & Pedersen, 2017, p. 130)

This idea of comparison is difficult to grasp but it may have important implications for the way in which comparison is practised in some educational contexts. How can a drawing be a comparison? Could isolating particular features of drawings, a move that appears to reduce the complexity, actually precipitate new orders of complexity and comparison? Rather than viewing abstractions as external arbiters that are applied to phenomena in order to enact comparison, can we conceive abstractions as internal differentiations that open up possibilities for practice? This would apply, in our case, to a drawing practice and to the practice of conceptualization by a teacher. This idea of abstraction as differentiation reverses the more commonly held view of abstraction as the application of external criteria to facilitate comparison, referring instead to an internal or intensive operation functioning from within. It is as though internal features differentiate and in doing so act intensively as comparisons from within and thus make possible a process of self-transformation. So rather than reading a drawing from established transcendent criteria from “outside” we might focus upon a particular localized mark configuration of a drawing, internal differentiations, and try to work with their immanent potential. This brings into play the inventive and creative work of pedagogical inquiry. The opportunity to explore and expand possibilities for practice, that of the child and that of the teacher. In such a move a drawing becomes “more than itself” both in terms of its internal differentiations and local potentials but also in terms of how an understanding of drawing practices might be extended by a teacher. Whilst in actual drawing practices the intensive process of internal differentiation is crucial and constitutes what we might call immanent and intensive transformations across practice, in assessment practices a drawing is constructed through assessment criteria abstracted from drawings which are then used to make comparisons between drawings. We might conceive these intensive transformations in terms of local rhythms of practice that provide the possibility for new directions to emerge. Holbraad and Pedersen (2017) summarize these points succinctly: ...comparison does no longer occur with reference to a higher level of abstraction and generalisation by reducing the individual complexities of and thus the differences between the

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objects of study, as in more conventional models of comparison. Rather, comparison occurs at the same order of reality and concretion as the object of study by unearthing differentiations within it. (p. 138)

Again the rejoinder that in pedagogic practice “the unearthing of differentiations within” is dependent upon the inventive capacity of the teacher to formulate such differentiations. The point of such comparison as developed by Strathern (2004) is not to “generalize over”, in our case children’s drawing practices, but to “recomplexify” such practices through paying due attention and careful conceptualization. We might say, following Holbraad and Pedersen (2017) that engaged in pedagogical inquiry the teacher becomes a “bricoleur of concepts, not imposed on, but extracted from, the [pedagogical] moments studied” (p. 138). It is in such moments that what I call “the gift of otherness” (Atkinson, forthcoming) emerges. I am using the term “otherness” in a number of associated ways. It can refer to those pedagogical moments already mentioned when we are confronted with the unfamiliar or the strange; that which is difficult to fit within our frameworks of comprehension, such as a child’s drawing over which we puzzle or perhaps a contemporary art performance which we find difficult to engage with. The task, I advocate, in relation to a pedagogy of taking-care, is to acknowledge that which is strange or “other” as a gift in order to expand our frameworks of practice, a gift of otherness for self-transformation. Such taking-care applies equally to noticing “what is happening”, in pedagogical encounters but also to the frameworks of understanding that we bring to such encounters in order to conceptualize them. It is a task that combines the notions of experimentation, reflexivity, conceptualization and invention in the face of otherness. Implicit to this task is an assumption of non-completeness and what we might call a productive hesitancy around pedagogic encounters that might involve practices that we find difficult to respond to but also facilitates a space for later pedagogical invention that brings about greater insight. In such moments of reflexivity and conceptualization the otherness of a puzzling experience of practice may lead to a widening of pedagogic inquiry.

References Atkinson, D. (2003). Art, identity and practice. Kluwer. Atkinson, D. (2011). Art, equality and learning: Pedagogies against the state. Sense. Atkinson, D. (2018) Art, ethics and disobedience: The adventure of pedagogy. Palgrave Macmillan. Atkinson, D. (forthcoming). Pedagogies of taking care: Art, pedagogy and the gift of otherness. Bloomsbury. Bogue, R. (2004). Search, wwim and see: Deleuze’s apprenticeship in signs and pedagogy of images. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 36(3), 327–342. Campbell, I. (2019) Deleuze and Guattari’s semiorhythmology: A sketch for a rhythmic theory of signs. La Deleuziana, 10, 351–370. Deleuze, G. (2008). Proust and signs. Continuum. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Athlone Press.

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Gerlach, J. (2010). Vernacular mapping, and the ethics of what comes next. Cartographica, 45(3), 165–168. Gerlach, J. (2014). Lines, contours and kegends: Coordinates for vernacular mapping. Progress in Human Geography, 38(1), 22–39. Grossberg, L., & Behrenshausen, B. G. (2016). Cultural studies and Deleuze-Guattari, part 2: From affect to conjunctures. Cultural Studies, 30(6), 1001–1028. Guattari, F. (1984a). Towards a micro-politics of desire. In Molecular revolution: Psychiatry and politics (pp. 163–172). Penguin Books. Guattari, F. (1984b) Meaning and power. In Molecular revolution: Psychiatry and politics (pp. 163– 172). Penguin Books. Hetrick, J. (2014). Video assemblages: ‘Machinic animism’ and ‘asignifying semiotics’ in the work of Melitopoulos and Lazzarato. Footprint, 53–68. Holbraad, M. & Pedersen, M. A. (2017). The ontological turn: An anthropological exposition. Cambridge University Press Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthroplogy, archaeology, art and architecture. Routledge. Lazzarato, M. (2014). Signs and machines. MIT Press. Lowenfeld, V. (1947). Creative and mental growth: A textbook on art education. MacMillan. McCormack, D. P. (2003). An event of geographical ethics in spaces of affect. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 28(4), 488–507. McCormack, D. P. (2017). The circumstances of post-phenomenological life worlds. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 42(1), 2–13. Sauvagnargues, A. (2016). Artmachines: Deleuze, Guattari. Edinburgh University Press. Savransky, M. (2017). The wager of an unfinished present: Notes on speculative pragmatism. In Speculative Research (pp. 25–38). Routledge. Serres, M. (2008). The five senses: A philosophy of mingled bodies. Continuum. Stengers, I. (2005a). Introductory notes on an ecology of practices. Cultural Studies Review, 11(1), 183–196. Stengers, I. (2005b). The cosmopolitical proposal. In B. Latour, & P. Weibel (Eds.), Making Things Public (pp. 994–1003). MIT Press. Strathern, M. (1988). The gender of the gift: Problems with women and problems with society in Melanesia. University of California Press. Strathern, M. (2004). Partial connections. Altamira Press. Strathern, M. (2018). Relations. In F. Stein, S. Lazar, M. Candea, H. Diemberger, J. Robbins, A. Sánchez, & R. Stasch. (Eds.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology. http://doi.org/10. 29164/18relations Street, A., & Copeman, J. (2013). Social theory after Strathern: An introduction. Theory Culture Society, 31(2/3), 7–37. Waddington, C. H. (1972). Tools for thought. Paladin. Whatmore, S. (2003). Generating materials. In M. Pryke, G. Rose & S. Whatmore (Eds.), Using social theory: Thinking through research (pp. 89–104). Sage.

Chapter 4

“These Are Lion Tracks”: A Place-Stories Approach to Childhood Drawing Christopher M. Schulte

Abstract Informed by the work of Fikile Nxumalo, specifically Nxumalo’s conceptualization of place stories, this chapter explores childhood drawing as that which is differentially situated and thus open to new and unsettling relations of place. While only a small gesture in the broader project of decolonizing the study of childhood drawing, a place-stories approach offers one possible strategy to begin the work of interrupting the colonial-ordered relations that routinely constitute children’s bodies, lives, and experiences at the drawing table. This chapter is grounded in fieldwork undertaken in the Fall of 2018 in a mixed-aged (3–5 years) preschool classroom at a university-affiliated childcare center in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. Keywords Children · Drawing · Place stories · Decoloniality

4.1 Introduction As a researcher, my work has largely focused on the problem of how and why young people go about drawing as they do (e.g. Schulte, 2011, 2013a, 2015a, 2015b, 2016). An essential feature of this work has been the process of balancing an appreciation for histories of the study of childhood drawing, particularly in the United States, while also fostering an attentiveness that is critical of this same history and its tendency to produce and sustain forms of inequity and deficit in children’s lives (e.g. Schulte, 2021). In this way, my work has focused on the matter of how to see and think differently (Dernikos et al., 2019) the already constructed problem (Olsson, 2013) of childhood drawing. The motives underlying this work are not fueled by an ambition to find neat or tidy solutions, nor are they intended to curate a more accurate or totalizing account of the social, cultural, and material processes of childhood drawing. Rather, my interest in the problem of how and why children draw is guided by the idea that drawing in childhood is always a problem expressed on the basis of its immediate C. M. Schulte (B) Shool of Art, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Trafí-Prats and C. M. Schulte (eds.), New Images of Thought in the Study of Childhood Drawing, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07143-0_4

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and emerging conditions (Deleuze, 2004, pp. 64–65) (see also Olsson, 2009, 2012; Schulte, 2019). For me, this has meant upholding a commitment to making visible— or at least acknowledging—the complex, situated, and variable ways that children’s bodies, lives, and ecologies materialize through drawing (e.g. Schulte, 2016, 2019). It has also meant complicating how early art educators and researchers, including myself, come to recognize and hold space for practices of understanding, relating to, and caring for such material processes (e.g. Schulte, 2013a, 2013b, 2018). Like many scholars in cultural studies, the arts and humanities, education, and the social sciences more broadly (e.g. Bennett, 2010; Braidotti, 2013; Tuin & Dolphijn, 2012; Ferrando, 2013; Halberstam & Livingston, 1995), the posthuman turn has been helpful in rethinking the material processes of daily life and experience, particularly the philosophical movements of feminist new materialisms (e.g. Braidotti, 2000; Coole & Frost, 2010) and material ecocriticism (e.g. Goodbody et al., 2011; Iovino, 2012a, 2012b; Iovino & Oppermann, 2012, 2014; Phillips & Sullivan, 2012; Sullivan, 2012). For those whose research is situated in childhood studies or a closely related field, posthumanism offers a conceptual language pertinent to the work of challenging the supremacy of traditional humanist frameworks in the study of children’s lives and experiences (e.g. Diaz-Diaz & Semenec, 2020). Spyrou (2019) does well to underscore this point, writing that a posthuman approach: Shifts the focus of analysis to the larger networks of forces, both material and discursive, which constitute the word as we come to know it. By decentering human beings, posthumanism challenges the humanist assumption of the autonomous, knowing subject who acts upon the world from a privileged position and introduces instead a relationality emerging from the encounter between human and non-human entities: entities do not pre-exist their coming together; they are constituted out of the relations they have with one another. (p. 316)

What Spyrou expresses here resonates with my own work related to the study of drawing in childhood. In particular, posthumanism has helped me to animate differently the material narrativity (Iovino & Oppermann, 2012) of childhood drawing. That is, to underscore the specific ways in which meanings, stories, and discourses are embedded in material forms, and the precise albeit often loose manner in which these forms intra-act with the lives and landscapes of children’s drawing (Schulte, 2019). As a researcher, childhood drawing has always registered as an event of relationality and contingency, a practice that is unapologetically situated in the “hereand-now” (Massey, 2005, p. 140). Of course, this isn’t to suggest that I have always succeeded in my efforts to consider with greater care “the where” (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015, p. 633) of childhood drawing and my own relations of complicity in its formation. Admittedly, I have not. But I do recognize that new and unsettling relations of place (Nxumalo, 2019, p. 8) are not only critical to thinking differently about the material narrativity of childhood drawing, but that such relations are essential too to holding space for the ways in which childhood drawing is differentially situated in early childhood. To recognize childhood drawing as that which is differentially situated is to understand that not all children experience the where of drawing in the same way. After all, the where of childhood drawing, particularly in early childhood settings in the United States, is always a relationality of colonial processes, policies, and practices that exist to reflect the children who will be regarded as important and

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those who by virtue of not fitting the dominant shape of normativity, are not. In this way, to recognize childhood drawing as differentially situated is to understand the where of childhood drawing as a site of decolonial praxis, a place that must be storied differently.

4.2 Place Stories In this chapter, I invoke the work of Fikile Nxumalo (e.g. 2016, 2019), specifically Nxumalo’s conceptualization of place stories, to consider the possibilities of thinking childhood drawing as that which is differentially situated—as a place story. For Nxumalo, place stories are stories that foreground the vibrancies of more-than-human worlds and their entanglements with children (see Nxumalo, 2016; Nxumalo & Rubin, 2018). In relation to the study of childhood drawing, Nxumalo’s concept of place stories holds considerable value. As an approach to thinking critically about the geopolitical and geohistorical complexities of place, Nxumalo’s conception of place stories renders as a possibility the act of disrupting “taken-for-granted settler colonial relations” (2016, p. 9) which continue to shape how many children’s lives, bodies, and experiences come to matter in early childhood education. I too see the need to trouble these relations as essential and urgent, as requisite to the work of unsettling the vast legacies of erasure that continue to animate how children and their drawing are understood and approached in early childhood settings. For this reason, I am committed to looking beyond perspectives that not only “story place as a mute site” (Nxumalo, 2019, p. 9) (see also Tuck & Yang, 2012) but also amplify the tendency to rouse these figurations in ways that mutate children’s efforts to story their own lives. Indeed, I am interested in how a place-stories approach might orientate place, not as a backdrop, but instead as “a field of experience” (Manning, 2013, p. 19), a situated and vibrant ecology of relations and agencies that can be “interpreted as forming narratives, stories” (Iovino & Oppermann, 2014, p. 1). And because these narratives are effectively stories of and about the doing of people and places, there is a greater potentiality perhaps to materialize “alternative, repressed and contradictory” (Somerville, 2006, para. 9) stories of drawing in childhood. As Cameron (2011) wisely points out, though, these stories are not “counterstories, subaltern stories, or even necessarily more true or just stories” (p. 172). Rather, these stories are “just different” (Pacini-Ketchavaw & Nxumalo, 2014, p. 133, original emphasis). Different because they are situated differently, which is to say that they order “the people and places…in different ways, calling into being not only a different understanding of the past but also animating different futures” (Cameron, 2011, p. 172). What Cameron says here is important. While a place stories approach may well represent that next important step, it does not represent the step, the one that will somehow manage to effectively unsettle existing “understandings and uses of place in childhood studies” (Trafí-Prats, 2019, p. 3) (see also e.g. Nxumalo & Cedillo, 2017), knowledges and practices that continue to take possession of children and their drawing. Nor does it mean that a place stories approach will somehow account for all

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of the “other dimensions” (Sakr et al., 2018, p. 11) of difference that constitute the work narratives of drawing in childhood and that typically materialize without notice or care. Rather, as a decolonizing strategy, a place-stories approach is ultimately a matter of being and becoming attuned to the smaller, more specific, and context explicit stories of children and their drawing. In this chapter, I advocate for and work to tell the kind of story that meddles in the middle, a story that may well fall short of resolving what’s gone on or even do well to describe it, but that ultimately attends to the matter of difference differently. As a story, it isn’t about totality, nor is it an articulation of fullness or even accuracy, per se. Rather, it is one possible approach to begin the work of decolonizing the study of childhood drawing. It’s still charged, still complicit, still personal, political, and partial. But it makes a point, a concerted effort, to tell a different story, one that aims to grasp and interrupt the “colonially ordered relations” (Nxumalo, 2019, p. 41) that continue to shape and validate how children’s drawing is understood and experienced in early childhood settings. For example, developmentalist perspectives regarding children and education, a largely Western conception of art and aesthetics, and an orientation to research and the researcher that is inadequately attuned to its own colonial impulse, histories, and interests. In this chapter, the place story that I share centers on my encounter with Mateo and Jacob, two four-year-old boys whose drawing practices I frequently observed and participated in while doing fieldwork at a university-affiliated childcare center in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States, in the Fall of 2018.

4.3 “These are lion tracks” Mateo’s voice could be heard in the distance as I entered the preschool classroom (ages 3–5). “Mr. Chris, Mr. Chris!” Mateo said, an announcement that also signaled to the other children in the class I had arrived. “Mr. Chris, come draw with us.” After placing my belongings in the coat closet near the door, I made my way to the back of the room and settled my body—rather uncomfortably—into a small chair at the drawing table. Mateo, who had so enthusiastically greeted my arrival, was now sitting at the table drawing with his “best friend,” Jacob. While many children frequent the drawing table, Mateo and Jacob are typically the first to choose this space when given the opportunity to do so. “Hi, Mr. Chris.” Jacob says, a smile flashing for me to see. “Hi Jacob. It’s nice to see you again.” After taking a moment to observe, I ask, “So, what are we making this morning?” Jacob, who was now holding three markers in his right hand—yellow, black, and grey, to be precise—paused for a moment, then lowered the trio of drawing implements onto the surface of his paper, the tips of the markers leaving behind three small inky impressions. “These...” He said, gathering my attention. “These… are lion tracks.” Then, with one swift motion he directed all of the markers across the surface of his paper, leaving in his wake the coordinated residue of three distinct lines. “It’s a what?” I asked. “Lion tracks.” Jacob replied. While Jacob has always been willing to converse with me about his work, he often does so in a calm and quiet manner, which makes it necessary at times to seek confirmation, so as not to misunderstand what he is sharing. With this in mind, I follow up with Jacob about his prior statement. “Lion tracks?” I ask. “Yeah.” He says, “Lion tracks.” Mateo, who was sitting to my left, had been listening carefully as Jacob and I discussed his lion tracks. “Well…” Mateo began,

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then hesitated. “Well, these are lion tracks.” I understood Mateo’s comment to be for Jacob. As Jacob looked on, listening, Mateo was pointing at a small yellow paw-shaped print he had drawn on his paper, a gesture which furthered his claim that what he had drawn was also a lion track. “No.” Jacob said, a reply that was unmistakably and sharply dismissive of Mateo’s claim. “These are lion tracks.” Jacob said, reinforcing the idea that his drawing was in fact the only viable example of lion tracks. Feeling that it may be important to support both Mateo and Jacob, as well as their drawing, I decided to speak up. “You know, I think they both look like lion tracks. One is a lion print (Mateo’s) and the other (Jacob’s) shows the pathway of the lion’s claw marks, his tracks.” Jacob, who surprisingly (to me) seemed appreciative I had weighed in, echoed support for the observation I had shared. “Yeah, that’s right.” He said, pointing to the three lines he’d drawn on the paper. “This one is the lion’s claw tracks.” However, Mateo didn’t appear to share this same sentiment. In fact, Mateo didn’t say anything at all. Rather, he seemed to be displeased, defeated even. In the moments that passed, even as Jacob continued to draw, Mateo remained silent, his chin pressed against his chest, eyes securely focused on the ground.

4.4 Remembrance and Obligation Several years have passed since my encounter with Mateo’s and Jacob’s drawing. Still, it is an event that requires “relentless remembering” (Tuck & Ree, 2013, p. 642). You know, the sort of remembering that never fully cedes control of your time and attention, that always forces you to see more—of yourself, of others, and of what surrounds. As a researcher, I’ve always felt it important to haunt the ruins of prior thought, especially my own. In this way, I view remembrance—particularly the relentless and difficult type—as hopeful. Hopeful because it always brings with it a degree of potential for generativity. Since this time, as I have continued to re-trace my encounter with Mateo’s and Jacob’s drawing, certain ideas, interests, and attachments have surfaced. Of course, I’ve tried to tell myself what these ideas mean, to solidify how they might matter. In the process of doing so, I have also expressed justifications to make it so, to shore up certain rationales I am partial to or that I believe enable a certain line of consideration. But recently, in an effort to do this work, I find myself revisiting a question I raised a few years back while doing research that, in part, focused on the challenges of posthumanism and its relation to the study of childhood drawing (Schulte, 2019) (see also e.g. Hacket et al., 2018; Thiel, 2018). I had wondered: What would it mean to think with posthumanist theory and the rightful critique that more-than-human relationalities risk perpetuating existing practices of colonial violence by not fully addressing the social inequalities present in children’s drawing? My purpose in asking this question was (and, still is) to make certain that when doing posthumanist work with children, what remains central is the very real material risk of perpetuating existing practices of colonial violence and/or exacerbating other forms of inequity and deficit. For example, the decision to see and think through a more-than-human lens makes sense when your own humanity has never really been in question. Certainly, as a White male, my own humanity is rarely—if ever—questioned. But what about the child? Aside from the usual frames of subjugation, age in particular, children’s bodies

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and lives are also reduced by, delegitimized through, and/or disregarded by structures, practices, and relations of coloniality. I wonder: What do these dehumanizing orders look like in early childhood settings, especially at the drawing table? It’s not that I had previously failed to understand these risks. Indeed, I did understand them, at least conceptually. But there is a clear and important difference between holding a conceptual understanding of what such risks may entail and having to negotiate the weight of these risks as they mark out in particular ways the bodies of those who exist in context before you, whose humanity—it seems—is always a matter of contemplation, a ruminative subject. In this sense, part of what I failed to recognize or understand was the need: To see/hear/feel/think the potentialities present in any given moment—the ghosts who linger to remind us, as Gordon notes, to stay “attuned to the task of ‘conjur[ing] up the appearances of something that [is] absent’” so that we might be open to recognizing and affirming the humanity that is already, always present. (citing Gordon, 2008; Dernikos et al., 2019, p. 11)

In reflecting back on Mateo’s and Jacob’s drawing, specifically that moment in which Mateo’s body went still and his voice quiet, the significance of Gordon’s ghostly reminder is ever present. Mateo’s silence is not merely a symbol of pain and displeasure, it also gives notice that “something is missing—that what appears to be invisible or in the shadows is announcing itself” (Radway, 2019, p. 15). In this way, Mateo’s silence is more declaration than defeat, a lingering reminder that in our engagements with children and their drawing, every presence is absence and every absence a presence. The uneasy reality though is that Mateo and his drawing is already subjected to an existence of silence, a configuration made and re-made on the basis of histories and practices that are always and inevitably geared to temper and transfigure their humanity, what Nxumalo refers to as taken-for-granted settler colonial relations. Herein too lies my own fraught network of obligation (Povinelli, 2012), to the difficult work of revisiting and remembering how I have chosen—and continue to choose—to acknowledge and care for some things and not others. Here, in this contemplative space that is always partial, always in and out of focus, always other than image and more than frame, Gordon’s task rings clear—that I can be opened to recognizing and affirming the humanity that is already present, but that I can also have a tendency to ignore or rationalize this same humanity from view. For Mateo, the only Latino and bilingual child in the classroom, might his silence be about something more than drawing? Indeed, might it also be about place and its relations to difference and exclusion, contradiction and ambivalence? In this way, might this ultimately be a place story, a site of narrativity capable of focusing to some degree, and perhaps differently, the sociocultural, aesthetic, educative, affective, and material relations of Mateo’s life at the drawing table?

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4.5 The Betrayals of Seeing “So, what are we making this morning?” Jacob, who was now holding three markers in his right hand—yellow, black, and grey, to be precise—paused for a moment, then lowered the trio of drawing implements onto the surface of his paper, the tips of the markers leaving behind three small, inky impressions. “These...” He said, gathering my attention. “These… are lion tracks.” Then, with one swift motion he directed all of the markers across the surface of his paper, leaving in his wake the coordinated residue of three distinct lines. “It’s a what?” I asked. “Lion tracks.” Jacob replied.

I return to this segment of the vignette because it speaks to the matter of my attraction to Jacob’s drawing. While this may not seem to be an overly important matter or even register as a detail germane to the larger question of why Mateo’s voice went silent, it is. You see, Mateo’s silence is part of a larger, more complicated story. A story about Mateo’s and Jacob’s drawing, yes, but also a story that features the places, histories, and peoples to which this event of drawing is connected, including my own histories and desirings for childhood drawing. After all, what was it about Jacob’s drawing that moved me to notice it first? What did I see in Jacob and his drawing that nudged me in his direction, that compelled me to care for the “how” and “why” of his work? To answer these questions, it is important to understand how drawing is traditionally approached and how it tends to be rendered as knowable in early childhood settings, especially in the United States. As adults, most of what we know about children and their art is informed by the ideas and attitudes that we carry with us—about children, about art, and about the educative spaces in which these clusters of values come together (Leeds, 1989). Within the broader context of early childhood education and care, particularly in the United States, our understandings of and expectations for how children engage with art making have been figured in large part by what McClure (2011) calls “optimizing discourses” (e.g. development, individualism, visual realism). This is also the case as it relates to early art education, where an emphasis on “what to do with materials” not only structures the type of curricular engagements children have, but also the idea that what matters most is their “developmental progression from exploration to representation” (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2017, p. 3) (see also e.g. Curtis & Carter, 2007). To ensure that children “learn the materials’ properties and functions,” teachers and caregivers are often given clear instructions in advance, especially as it relates to the organization and arrangement of materials, but also the nature of the activity itself and the expectations around outcomes. The larger idea being that when children demonstrate an acceptable degree of familiarity and facility with the materials, they are then encouraged to use the same materials to represent their ideas and other objects from their surroundings (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2017, p. 3). In this way, Jacob’s lion tracks’ drawing is a clear departure from this more normalized view of childhood art. Of course, this isn’t to suggest that children in early childhood spaces don’t frequently draw like Jacob or that children’s drawing practices don’t often share or rely upon similar qualities and concerns. Certainly, many children draw in this way, which is to say that for many children drawing is a

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performative act, a practice that unfolds in the company of others, including peers and adults, and that consists too of ideas, interests, and materials that may not always appear in the drawing itself (Thompson, 2009; Sakr et al., 2018; Schulte, 2011). But herein lies the problem. You see, there is often a disconnect between what and how children draw and the extent to which the qualities and processes of this drawing, especially for adults, actually register as such, as drawing. While there is no shortage of contributing factors to this outcome, one of the main reasons is due to the fact that we (adults) have a tendency to make sense of childhood “through adulthood” (Lee, 2001, p. 8), a process that in turn positions childhood drawing—and other materialdiscursive practices in childhood (e.g. Thiel, 2015, 2018; Trafí-Prats, 2017)—to be seen as acts of preparation for the future (Schulte, 2021). This way of seeing tends to focus children and their drawing rather specifically, often at the expense of the very complexities that so distinctly and remarkably reflect children’s interests and participation. The result? What children draw is often viewed by adults as a kind of printout of the child’s mind (Golomb, 2004). This assumption, that you can effectively use children’s drawings to establish enduring, even universal connections between age and competence (Alderson, 2008; Hockney & James, 2003; James, 2004; Landsdown, 2005) is not only problematic, it is an assumption that positions adults—and the institutions to which they are committed—to think they can also credibly place the child(ren) they work with, whom they have an ethical responsibility to care for, to contemplate, and to contextualize. It is also an assumption that speaks to a key distinction within the study of childhood drawing, one that many parents, teachers, and researchers often diminish or ignore. That is, the subtle yet crucial difference between children’s drawing and children’s drawings. It is a distinction that, as Pearson (2001) writes, directs us to recognize “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” (p. 348). This isn’t to suggest that children’s reasons for engaging in the practice of drawing have never been considered. Rather, these considerations have remained dependent on our reading of the residues—those often limiting and low-resolution accounts in which children’s actual motivations for drawing tend to fare badly. Of course, this isn’t a “deliberate hoax” (Duncum, 1982, p. 32) on the part of researchers, teachers, or parents, but it is in fact a hoax, one that continues to mislead many adults to frame their engagements with childhood drawing in ways that actually disempower the child and decontextualize their drawings (Tarr, 1992) (see also e.g. Schulte, 2021; Sunday, 2015; Thompson, 2009). The point being, and to bring this back to my encounter with Jacob’s and Mateo’s drawing, I have become accustomed to looking for and seeing moments like this, with Jacob, moments that occasion opportunities to speak back to the “grand narratives” of childhood art (Sakr et al., 2018, p. 2). You see, in opening myself to see children and their drawing differently, I’ve still managed to lose sight of the fact that my seeing, despite the aim to be more inclusive, is always prone to betrayals of exclusion, inclined to be at least a little “irrational, inconsistent, and undependable” (Elkins, 1997, p. 11). In this way, seeing in research will always be a matter of believing and

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learning to distrust the very “cluster of promises” (Berlant, 2010, p. 93) we make to ourselves, and that we often expect others and their work to make visible for us. With this in mind, I return to the vignette.

4.6 Relations of Erasure Mateo, who was sitting to my left, had been listening carefully as Jacob and I discussed his lion tracks. “Well…” Mateo began, then hesitated. “Well, these are lion tracks.” I understood Mateo’s comment to be for Jacob. As Jacob looked on, listening, Mateo was pointing at a small yellow paw-shaped print he had drawn on his paper, a gesture which furthered his claim that what he had drawn was also a lion track. “No.” Jacob said, a reply that was unmistakably dismissive of Mateo’s claim. “These are lion tracks.” Jacob said, reinforcing the idea that his drawing was in fact the only viable example of lion tracks.

This exchange between Mateo and Jacob reflects not only the fact that drawing is “a deeply social activity” (Sunday & Conley, 2020, p. 19), it also highlights how children use drawing to “manipulate their relationships with peers” (Dyson, 1993, p. 12). I mention this, not to suggest that Jacob and Mateo are not friends or that they are not also committed to protecting the shared space that drawing provides (Corsaro, 1985). They are indeed invested in this work. But just as children are “generous in admitting others to their expressive acts” (Thompson & Bales, 1991, p. 54), they are equally skilled and willing to challenge how others participate in relation to these acts (Schulte, 2018). For me, this is how Jacob’s dismissal of Mateo’s lion tracks initially registered, as a kind of volley for status and recognition. However, in the months and years following this event, as I reflected and began to consider Nxumalo’s (2019) conceptualization of place stories, I became increasingly concerned about what else might be happening here, especially for Mateo. What became clear was the need to recognize that Mateo and Jacob, as well as their drawing, are differentially situated in this place (Nxumalo & Cedillo, 2017, p. 102). In other words, while it may be the case that Jacob and Mateo are both situated at the drawing table, of considerable difference is the matter of how they are situated in this place. And so, to begin to tell differently the story of Mateo’s silence, of this exchange between Mateo and Jacob, of their drawing more generally, and my own attractions and betrayals as an interested adult, including the “extractive” (Tuck, 2017) liberties I take in relation to Nxumalo’s work, I must be willing to story and re-story the place of Mateo’s and Jacob’s drawing. While I can’t claim with certainty that doing this will somehow enable me to disrupt or effectively look beyond the “innocent perspectives” I’ve become accustomed to living with, even making a home for, the importance of and necessity to articulate an “explicitly politicized” engagement with the place of Mateo’s and Jacob’s drawing is apparent (Nxumalo & Cedillo, 2017, p. 103). To resist this commitment, of having to think about and be in dialogue with the place of children’s drawing and to be made to encounter the various practices that produce children’s drawing as “ungeographic” (Tuck & Habtom, 2019, p. 245) (see also e.g. Lipsitz, 2011), is to perpetuate an already vast and ever-present network of erasure in

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children’s lives (Dyson, 1993; Gal, 2012; Irvine & Gal, 2000). These perpetuations, what Dyson (1993) refers to as violations (p. 200), author into children’s lives new stories of rejection and marginalization. But they also require of children a forced return to the erasures of their past. I wonder about this, for Mateo, about his silence and the dismissals that led to it. It isn’t only that Mateo’s lion tracks’ drawing was dismissed, though this relation of erasure is important. It is also the fact that Mateo’s drawing was an explicit performance of the educational and aesthetic qualities valued most by his teachers, and especially the school. In other words, it’s that this too was dismissed, a symptom perhaps of the broader socio-spatial arrangement Mateo is part of, a normed formation that subtly and not so subtly measures his existence and participation in the classroom against a prevailing set of cultural beliefs about children, their art, and about learning and education more broadly (Lee, 2001) (see also e.g. Korzenik, 1981; McArdle & Piscitelli, 2002; Wilson, 1997). That this set of cultural beliefs exists isn’t surprising. Nor is it entirely novel that what prevails does so at the expense of the particular knowledges, practices, and experiences Mateo brings with him—that is, those historical and temporal specificities rooted in his own childhood experience (Prout, 2004, p. 61), details that shape how he orientates himself to the classroom and its activity. For me, this is what makes Mateo’s lion tracks so compelling. That is, that Mateo’s lion tracks were created by using a stencil, which was provided by his teachers. To highlight the stencil here is to circle back to my earlier point, as informed by the work of Pacini-Ketchabaw et al. (2017), that art making in early childhood is often viewed and approached through a lens of progression, a lens that emphasizes how young people manage to move (or don’t) from one developmental milestone to the next (Sakr et al., 2018). The stencil is what Gerde et al. (2012) describe as a tool, an element of support used by teachers to scaffold children’s early efforts to draw and make art. Tools like this are common in early childhood settings, especially in relation to children’s early writing experiences (e.g. Clark & Kragler, 2005; Gerde & Bingham, 2012). The point being that the stencil is significant not because it is common or because it is a problematic pedagogical tool but because Mateo actually uses it to draw. By Mateo choosing to use the stencil, he does the very thing that is of value to his teachers and the classroom. He utilizes the tool, the one with verified credibility, to situate himself—and his practice—within the “confines of normalcy” (Dyer, 2020, p. 6) as it exists at the drawing table. In doing so, Mateo articulates what he presumes to be an acceptable, normed presence for himself. But this isn’t what happens. Rather, Mateo’s efforts to be seen, to become a visible example of the desirable child-student-artist subject are instead figured as yet another relation of erasure.

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4.7 Dispossession While focusing on the relation of the stencil to Mateo’s drawing may seem unusual or even insignificant, it is a detail that speaks to the subtle yet powerful ways in which children in early childhood settings, particularly BIPOC children, are incessantly figured by acts of dispossession (Butler & Athanasiou, 2013) (see also e.g. Templeton & Cheruvu, 2020). Butler and Athanasiou (2013) describe dispossession as an “aporia,” an enduring and unsolvable contradiction. On the one side, dispossession signifies an inaugural submission of the subject-to-be to norms of intelligibility, a submission which, in its paradoxical simultaneity with mastery, constitutes the ambivalent and tenuous process of subjection. It thus resonates with the psychic foreclosures that determine which ‘passionate attachments’ are possible and plausible for ‘one’ to become a subject. (Butler & Athanasiou, 2013, p. 1)

Here, what Butler and Athanasiou write about dispossession shares an important correspondence to Mateo’s decision to use the stencil. While on the surface Mateo’s decision is likely to be viewed as inconsequential, I see it as an act of submission in the sense that Butler and Athanasiou describe it. Prior to this encounter, it was not only unlikely that Mateo would use this type of teacher-selected tool, but Mateo’s drawing had also been clearly grounded in an archive of imagery and convention he had established for himself, the result of his ongoing engagements with the visual repertoires of his surroundings and interactions with peers. Not that Mateo had never found useful the support of such tools. Rather, the point is that I’d never witnessed him use or show interest in such resources, especially while drawing. And while my sense of this matter is limited and speculative, my impression is that Mateo’s life in the classroom had become somewhat delicate, which is to say that Mateo may have come to feel vulnerable or uncertain about his relations to the classroom, to his teachers, and perhaps his peers too. In this way, I see Mateo’s decision not only as an inaugural submission, a move to perform the norms of intelligibility he understood to be valued by his teachers and the broader classroom culture he participates in, but also as an attempt to “confuse” (James, 2004, p. 395) (see also Thompson, 2006) the very norms that had come to define his life and work in the classroom, especially at the drawing table. After all, if Mateo manages to effectively perform the norms of intelligibility that traditionally constitute his being and experience in classroom life as “other,” might this subversion enable him to possess the acceptable mixture of normalcy he is too often made to be without? I wonder about this, if Mateo’s decision to use the stencil was not in fact a direct attempt to secure this possibility. But I also know, upon reflection, that even if Mateo managed to ascertain the sense of normalcy he may have been seeking out, it would have been a fleeting experience. After all, Mateo’s efforts to occupy this accepted and desirable terrain of artistic and cultural normalcy were again “abjected,” this time by a new set of normative and normalizing powers (Butler & Athanasiou, 2013, p. 2). For Butler and Athanasiou (2013), the concept of abjection is critical to addressing how certain bodies come to be excluded or rendered unintelligible, especially if and

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when normalizing boundaries, values, and positions give the appearance of being under threat or demonstrate a need for preservation. For Butler, specifically, of particular importance is the processes by which bodies come to be excluded (see, e.g. 1990, 1993); meaning, it isn’t only the outcome of exclusion and unintelligibility that matters. Of equal and/or greater importance are the structural, relational, and affective processes that generate such exclusions and that continue to render certain bodies as unintelligible. In this way, abjection is interactive, a conceptual dynamic that opens us to the ambiguity and unease that gathers and accumulates when normative and normalizing powers buckle beneath the weighted presence of difference. This abjection then, of Mateo and his work, is what Butler and Athanasiou (2013) describe as the “other side” of dispossession, insofar as this side can ever really be understood as other. The other side of dispossession “refers to the processes and ideologies by which persons are disowned and abjected by normative and normalizing powers” (p. 2). For Mateo, who in this particular place is always pre-figured as “other,” the challenge lies in the incessant mobility and transformation of what constitutes cultural intelligibility and the modalities of normalcy and difference that, in relation to it, make it—and him—other. While Jacob and I may not have intended to source this mobilization, we were undoubtedly complicit in the process of generating and extending it. Indeed, it was us—Mateo’s trusted drawing colleagues—who enacted this additional relation of erasure, giving way to a new contour of normalcy at the drawing table, one that Mateo—again—was unable to successfully and comfortably inhabit. As a researcher, I wish I could relive this moment with a different sensibility for the complexities that were at play. That said, recognizing the existence of these erasures and having an appreciation for how they materialize provides an important occasion (though, after the fact) to perceive something different in Mateo’s drawing and to perceive Mateo and his drawing differently. This isn’t to suggest that Mateo’s experience of erasure is justified or acceptable. Nor does the act of recognizing my own complicity enable me to recompense, to atone. Rather, the point is that the relationality of erasure in which Mateo’s drawing resides should not only cause me to take pause, but also remind me to notice the “material-discursive boundaries and hierarchical orderings that come to matter” (Nxumalo, 2019, p. 43) in my work with children, orderings that too often shape my—and perhaps other adults’—relations to children’s encounters with particular settler colonial places like schools and classrooms, or in this case the drawing table. Here, I am referring to the systemic indignities at play in early childhood spaces, particularly in the United States, where knowledge about what is good and appropriate tends to be grounded in mainstream, Anglo-US developmental psychology, a discourse so prevalent it is nearly imperceptible in everyday practice (Burman, 2017). Additionally, and relatedly, is the arts-oriented work that occurs in early childhood spaces. Even when conceptualized or approached as a kind of “process art” (see, e.g. Stone & Chakraborty, 2011), where the work of making is prioritized over the product that gets made, children’s material engagements tend to be defaulted to a view that favors (though often unknowingly) the Eurocentric aesthetic values of visual realism (see, e.g. Chalmers, 2019; Duncum, 1990; Knight, 2013; Sakr et al., 2018). The point being that embedded in early childhood settings and often intensely embodied by the

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adults who occupy these spaces is a vast network of colonial-ordered relations, each grounded in and reliant on a developmental account of the child, art, and education. While these particular systemic indignities are far from novel, nor the only sources of deficit, possession, and erasure in children’s lives (particularly at the drawing table), their enduring presence makes clear the need to become orientated to the where of childhood drawing, in hopes of generating new, different, and unsettling relations of place. This is how a place-stories approach stands to make a difference.

4.8 A Place-Stories Approach A place-stories approach is ultimately a matter of becoming attuned to the ways children and their drawing are differentially situated. In this way, the conceptual impulse of a place-stories approach to childhood drawing corresponds with what Donna Harraway (1988) calls “situated knowledges” (p. 583). For Haraway, situated knowledges are figured on the basis of how and why they are positioned, by the politics of their location. As a researcher of childhood art, drawing in particular, the process of seeking out and sharing situated stories of place is essential to building toward and promoting knowledges that are “anticolonial in orientation” (Nxumalo, 2019, p. 52). Yet, while the anticolonial orientations of a place-story may well be directed toward “settler colonialism and its ongoing resonances in the practices of everyday life,” it is nonetheless—and inescapably so—"a messy, provisional, and imperfect” practice (p. 52). Still, I contend that this messiness and its procurement of imperfection is precisely what makes a place-stories approach to childhood drawing so important. A place-stories approach not only draws attention to the heteronormative and (neo)colonial orderings that shape how childhood drawing is experienced and understood, a place-stories approach also orientates us—as researchers, teachers, and interested adults—to the various logics and normative powers at play in settler colonial places such as schools and other educative spaces where children gather (like the drawing table), spaces that continue to legitimize these relations as totalizing and true, as acceptable, right, and necessary. The point being that a place-stories approach will never manage to sufficiently remedy or even clarify this mess, to somehow eradicate the silent, subtle, and salient forms of colonialism that are present and that continue to perpetuate existing reductions and exclusions in the study of childhood drawing, especially for children who are simply unable to embody the relations of normalcy that are desired most. After all, as Nxumalo (2019) points out, “colonialisms are [always] shifting, malleable, and articulated differently in different places at different times—often in contradictory and contingent ways” (p. 55). I suspect that Mateo, like many other children who are unable to reproduce or perform the settler colonial values embedded in early childhood curricula (see, e.g. Bentley & Reppucci, 2013; Templeton & Cheruvu, 2020), carries with him an intensely vital comprehension of this reality. A placestories approach to childhood drawing leans into this very problematic, with the aim to enter with greater care and thoughtfulness the processes by which colonialisms

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in early childhood education, especially at the drawing table, differentially affect and codify children’s bodies and experiences. While it may only be a gesture in the broader project of decolonizing the study of childhood drawing, a place-stories approach offers one possible strategy to begin this important work.

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Templeton, T. N., & Cheruvu, R. (2020). Childhood innocence for settler children: Disrupting colonialism and innocence in early childhood curriculum. The New Educator, 16(2), 131–148. Thiel, J.J. (2015). “Bumblebee’s in trouble!” Embodied literacies during imaginative superhero play. Language Arts, 93(1), 38–49. Thiel, J. J. (2018). “A cool place where we make stuff”: Co-curating relational Spaces of Muchness. In C. M. Schulte & C. M. Thompson (Eds.), Communities of practice: Art, play, and aesthetics in early childhood (pp. 23–37). Springer. Thompson, C. M. (2006). The ket aesthetic: Visual culture in childhood. In J. Fineberg (Ed.), When we were young: New perspectives on the art of the child (pp. 31–43). University of California Press. Thompson, C. M. (2009). Mira! Looking, listening, and lingering in research with children. Visual Arts Research, 35(1), 24–34. Thompson, C. M., & Bales, S. (1991). “Michael doesn’t like my dinosaurs”: Conversations in a preschool art class. Studies in Art Education, 31(1), 43–55. Trafí-Prats, L. (2017). Learning with children, trees, and art: For a compositionist visual art-based research. Studies in Art Education, 58(4), 325–334. Trafí-Prats, L. (2019). Fugitive pedagogies: Decolonizing black childhoods in the Anthropocene. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 41(3), 359–371. https://doi. org/10.1080/01596306.2019.1589671 Tuck, E. (@tuckeve) (2017). “To watch the white settlers sift through our work as they ask, ‘Isn’t there more for me here? Isn’t there more for me to get out of this?’” Twitter, October 8, 11:40 a.m. https://twitter.com/tuckeve/status/917067274799984641 Tuck, E., & Habtom, S. (2019). Unforgetting place in urban education through creative participatory visual methods. Educational Theory, 69(2), 241–256. Tuck, E., & McKenzie, M. (2015). Relational validity and the “where” of inquiry: Place and land in qualitative research. Qualitative Inquiry, 21(7), 633–638. Tuck, E., & Ree, C. (2013). A glossary of haunting. Handbook of autoethnography, 639–658. Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization: Indigeneity. Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40. Tuin, I. V. D., & Dolphijn, R. (2012). New materialism: Interviews & cartographies. Open humanities press. Wilson, B. (1997). Child art, multiple interpretations, and conflicts of interest. In A. M. Kindler (Ed.), Child development in art (pp. 81–94). National Art Education Association.

Chapter 5

Curves, Sways, Loops, Folds and Witches’ Traps: Sensing Duration in Sylvie’s Drawings Laura Trafí-Prats

Abstract The chapter develops alternative senses of time in children’s drawing by examining an event, where a girl called Sylvie, created a suite of twelve drawings composed by variations of swaying, looping, encircling lines and stories revolving around fairies, witches, traps, houses, and snow. The chapter considers this event as existing in duration with two other events that occurred the same day. Bergson’s philosophy of time opens the possibility to understand children’s drawings in ways where the repetition of movements and abstract marks is considered in relation to difference, variation, and qualitative change. The chapter offers important concepts to disrupt and resist a dominant narrative in the study of children’s drawings where repetition tends to be interpreted as sameness and unified under developmental patterns. Bergson’s philosophy discriminates between differences in kind and differences in degree, thereby suggesting that qualitative change is not accumulative. Qualitative change expresses differences in quality not in quantity, and attends to sensuous, aesthetic and material transformation in drawings, even minor ones. Qualitative change responds to the ways existing marks, gestures and other bodied memories compose and join with the ongoing flow of matter, language, bodies and images in an open-ended field of indeterminacy that generates variation, experimentation and becoming. The chapter argues that drawing practices are particularly important in both facilitating and registering such temporal, material and subjective compositions and in resisting the ongoing homogenization and standardization of childhood and children’s creative practices. Keywords Children’s drawing · Mark-making · Bergson · Duration · Repetition · Difference

L. Trafí-Prats (B) Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Trafí-Prats and C. M. Schulte (eds.), New Images of Thought in the Study of Childhood Drawing, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07143-0_5

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5.1 Introduction In this chapter, I focus on three creative events that happened through the course of one day in a 3-year-old nursery class situated in an urban area of England’s Northwest, where I did weekly observations on the topic of material play. Through the chapter, I refer to the mentioned creative events with the names The salt and flour play, The dance of wrapping and unwrapping, and Sylvie’s series of 12 drawings. Thinking with Bergson’s philosophy, I examine these events interconnectedly as duration. Duration is a concept that prompts us to think of experience as a temporal and heterogenous, sensuous flow (Bergson, 2001). I argue that thinking of drawing with a non-linear temporality offers a different perspective to reconsider the persistence of developmental approaches and representational narratives in the study of children’s drawings. For this, I follow de Freitas and Ferrara (2016) in affirming that Bergson’s alignment of perception with action and materiality carries important consequences in reframing learning and development in the early years, where perception is commonly correlated with knowledge and “the existence of internal representations” (p. 44). Two central questions are explored across the text: (1) Does the time of children’s drawing pertain only to the drawing act and the accumulation of drawing acts over time, or is it perhaps the case that the time of children’s drawings pertains to duration, immanence and becoming? (2) How can adults value and recognize differential qualities in children’s drawings that seem to be grounded in repetition, both of gesture and cultural references?

5.2 Background These two questions and the associated study are grounded in posthumanist new materialist research in relation to material play and literacies in early childhood. This research seeks to disrupt a developmentalist approach to early childhood as organized around the binaries of body/mind and material/discourse which sees children as future rational adults (Moss, 2014, 2019; Murris, 2016). In privileging the mind over the body, developmentalism abstracts children’s sensuous bodies from their worldly milieus, favoring knowledge generation over being, becoming and relating (MacLure, 2016). Posthumanist new materialist research in childhood studies has been highly influenced by Barad’s (2008) agential realist onto-epistemology, and its central assumption that ontology is not made of things or individualities (e.g. the child), but of phenomena that function as “dynamic topological reconfigurings/entanglements/relationalities/(re)articulations” (p. 135). For Barad, these phenomena are of discursive-material nature and function in ongoing intra-activity. The concept of intra-activity means that there is not an outside to discursive-material relations. Henceforth, there is not a moment in which sensuous activity in the

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world passes into the mental representations of the child, making these function autonomously from bodied actions and perceptions (Murris, 2016). Posthumanist new materialist studies interrogate a transcendent vision of the human in which children are centered in a world that is there to serve their expression and interests. Instead, such studies favor an ontology of immanence where there are flow, encounter, contagion and porous borders between human and nonhuman relationalities (Lenz Taguchi, 2009). In such an ontology, materials are never fixed in pre-scripted uses, but always mobile in intra-activity with other materials, places and bodies (Thiel, 2018). This enacts distributed forms of agency, bringing the attention of research and pedagogy to the qualitative differences, newness and creation emerging from the middle of relationalities (Kuby & Gutshall Rucker, 2016). Immanence connects to processual practices of making sense with children, that foreground action, invention and becoming. These along with attentive practices of listening and documenting are privileged over educational practices directed to acquiring information and getting the right answers (Olsson, 2009). Thus, posthumanist new materialist research suggests diffractive rather than interpretative readings of educational situations. These consider that the materialization of the world happens in ongoing “relational mo(v)ements” (Sellers, 2013, p. 20) that cannot be understood by standing outside, observing, annotating and documenting but require “respectful practices of engagement” (p. 20). It proposes an ethical commitment toward making matter in ways that open up, expand and radically reconfigure our entanglements and interdependencies with the more than human (Osgood, 2019). As an artist and art educator interested in creative and improvisational processes with children and materials, in this chapter I aim to further explore the experience of moving with/being moved by the duration of the preschool classroom, its bodies and how they orient towards matter. I advance that the concept of time as real duration (Bergson, 1990, 2001) brings us to recognize children as “becoming bodies in movement” (Manning, 2009, p. 6). The concept of real duration provides a path for thinking the time and temporalities of childhood more broadly resisting the linear definition of time that homogenizes and standardizes childhood (Tesar, 2016). From the perspective of a philosophy of duration, children’s concrete actions in the present are approached as radical openings to a future that we do not know yet, and seen in terms of incipiency, creation and differentiation (Grosz, 2000).

5.3 Time and Drawing Before delving into the discussion of duration in the preschool classroom and how duration helps thinking in the three aforementioned events, in this section I devote some attention to consider the question of time in relation to drawing. Ingold (2013) has noted that drawing presents time in terms of flow, making drawing more similar to music and dance than to photography where time is frozen (see also Berger & Savage, 2005). Nonetheless, different from music and dance, the drawing’s movement and

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gesture leave the trace of a series of marks. By following these marks on the surface of the canvas one can feel temporality as flux, repetition, matter-time compressions, extensions and spacings (Ingold, 2013). This is important because it means that the practice of drawing orientates toward concrete experiences of time as duration. Consequently, drawing appears as a key practice for experimenting with different childhood temporalities in the classroom (Tesar et al., 2016). Although issues of process, immanence, movement and territory seem central to discussions of drawing in contemporary art and studies of children drawing, the existing literature pays little attention to the relatedness of time and temporality with these concepts, although there are important exceptions (Atkinson, 2018; Knight, 2012, 2013) (see also Tesar et al., 2016). In the paragraphs below I engage with a few remarkable examples to foreground how in drawing practices time opens up and diversifies beyond chrononormativity proposing local and minor ways of being, belonging and assembling with other bodies and the world that differ from the linearity of neoliberal individualism (Freeman, 2019) and developmentalism. The drawing and mapping experiments that French psychoanalyst and educator Ferdinand Deligny (Sauvagnargues, 2016) developed with autistic children in rural residential care, are compelling examples to see how drawing is grounded in sensuous, embodied and territorial dimensions of the self. While notions of territory and movement are commonly discussed in connection to Deligny’s mappings (Sauvagnargues, 2016), their making depends too on cultivating a sense of time centered on becoming and attending to lines of flight. In these mappings, children traced their daily movements, from their bedrooms to the kitchen to the well, and so forth in large pieces of mylar paper. Besides the lines describing functional movements, other less straight lines revealed wandering moments that emerged in connection to changes in the environment and their affective impact in the body. When placed one above the other, the translucent maps showed the same functional lines, but exposed unique wanderings happening each day. Grosz (2008) has characterized such wanderings as made through experiences of cosmic time, a temporality that manifests in the midst of environmental forces that “impinge on us as living beings” (p. 86). These forces include gravitation, inertia, attraction, pressure and growth which affect our bodied capacities and presence in space. More than a transcendental and linear experience of time, cosmic time makes experience to be intensive, immanent and more than human. The tracings and mappings that Deligny and the children created are intents of composing with such forces and extracting something that partakes of them (Atkinson, 2018), and in this volume; Trafí-Prats & Caton, 2020). They orient toward a time of the new, a time that opens up to sensation and the force of the future rather than representation of something that already exists (Grosz, 2008). A responsive and co-constitutive dynamic between body and milieu seems also central to Trisha Brown’s performative practices of mark-making (Eely, 2014). As a choreographer, Brown is interested in the relation between drawing and movement, and the relatedness of space-movement-gesture-mark. Her drawing performances break with chronormative time through slowing, repeating, stuttering and putting the gestures of mark-making to the limits of the body. Like in Deligny’s ethological

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pedagogy, Brown’s drawings also break with a symbolic approach to the mark. Drawn marks resist to be reduced to communication, recognition, classification and other practices that inform narratives of normative development. Brown defends the illegibility of her marks, affirming that they are more haptic than visual, carrying a variety of expressive, bodied and temporal qualities (automatic, spontaneous, evoked or chanceful). Each drawing is an unrepeatable experimentation with time–space that is impossible to re-present. It can only be invented anew every time. While discussions of time and temporality are a rare focus in recent studies of children’s drawing, a concrete notion of time seems to be central to the ways in which contemporary literature remarks the situatedness of children drawing practices and opposes the homogenizing levels and categories of developmentalist accounts. For example, Kind (2018) discusses a project with 3-year olds on human figure drawings, in which the problematic of how to draw specific body poses moves circularly, immanently and collectively across practices of drawing that iteratively combine experimentation–observation–representation–invention. Similarly, Olsson (2013) elaborates on a project in which preschool children learned to write/draw their names as an exercise of grappling with the problematic of how words connect to things and express changing qualities in such things. As weeks passed, children shared, discussed and drew multiple versions of their names that evolved and mutated in connection to transformations in children’s physical and psychical states, emerging problems, responses to unexpected events in the classroom, etc. Both Kind’s and Olsson’s drawing projects reveal the processual temporality of becoming, that features both life, objects and identity as contingent, profuse, distributed and uncertain. Kind’s and Olsson’s drawing projects concern beings situated at the center of duration’s continuity, “the indivisible interpenetration of life and matter, the intervals between things, states and properties” (Grosz, 2004, p. 155). Duration speaks of an experience of time that is continuous, heterogenous, where qualities interpenetrate each other. Differences cannot be captured as distinct things to which we apply categories, differences can only be divided “into successive interpenetrating wholes rather than into juxtaposed parts” (p. 159). Manning (2009) writes that “duration is the plane of experience on which expressive finality has not taken hold” (p. 6). Cull Ó Maoilearca (2015) notes that while “duration can be divided into individual moments, this is a form of abstraction that alters the nature of the quantitative multiplicity as a continuous unfolding of difference” (p. 188). In what follows, I continue extending the philosophical discussion around the concept of duration with the aim of developing an understanding of Sylvie’s suite of 12 drawings as existing in duration with two other events that occurred the same day, the salt and flour play, and the dance of wrapping and unwrapping.

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5.4 Thinking Sylvie’s Drawings as Duration After the lunch recess, I come back to the classroom. I notice that A4 pieces of white paper and colored pencils and pens have been placed on the central table. Few children are sitting around, including Sylvie. I sit on the table by Sylvie’s side curious about her drawings. A spree of 12 drawings is materialised in less than fifteen minutes. Many of her drawings seem to begin with a continuous, expansive, encircling line around the edges of the paper. At different points the line variates and complicates its curvilinear path, rendering smaller and bigger loops. Sometimes the line stops, and another curve or motif is initiated at a different point in the paper. She also adds squares, circles and perpendicular crosses, the combination of these different elements is used to form and enrich more complex structures. (see Fig. 5.1) As all this goes on, Sylvie hums and sometimes verbalizes the main song from the film Frozen. Sometimes the humming stops and more clear utterances are pronounced. More than as descriptions of the drawing, the utterances emerge out of it in simultaneity with certain graphic features and movements of the line: “the witch trap”, “the queen house”, “the fairy house”, which suddenly contains “a little fairy house”, and “a cave trap”, and “it is a trap because it has snow … a lot of snow”.

This is a short vignette that I wrote the day after observing the event of Sylvie’s suite of 12 drawings. In it, I aimed to convey the gestural and graphic energy with which Sylvie transformed the bleak neutrality of the paper and how in the process of such transformation a series of curvilinear movements and motifs central to Sylvie’s life in the classroom, witches, traps, fairies, fairy houses, other houses, snow made an appearance. At that moment, I was interested to show that language, more than being an intentional communication commanded by the child, emerged in heterogeneous expressive activity, “operating at the boundary of language, sensation and materiality” (Hackett et al. 2020, p. 4), in which the act of drawing was of primary importance. As the time passed, aspects that go beyond these initial intentions have continued bringing me back to think with this event. These aspects connect with repetition and with the repetitions that happened not only in the drawings but throughout the three aforementioned events. In this respect, I feature the “The witch trap” and allusions to curvilinear gestures in the title of the chapter more as a reference to the nature of my own observation of these repetitions than as an account seeking to convey a core meaning associated with Sylvie’s drawings, if that is ever possible. Somehow “the witch trap” was a motif among the many invoked by Sylvie that repeated in different occasions of that day, and as said “operat[ed] at the boundary of language, sensation and materiality” (Hackett et al. 2020, p. 4). It repeated in the drawings, as a flowery formation of loops around a central point topped with a cross (see Figs. 5.2 and 5.8), but it was also invoked in other occasions when Sylvie was immersed in different activities. Thus, the witch trap (but the other motifs too) was central to the ways Sylvie moved, dwelled in the space, engaged with materials and related to other bodies. Such repetition and its resistant and unclear legibility attracted me. It made me wonder, in the ways wonder can “exert a kind of fascination, and have a capacity to animate further thought” (MacLure, 2013, p. 228).

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Fig. 5.1 Sylvie in the process of creating drawing #1

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Fig. 5.2 Sylvie drawing a witch trap in drawing #2

Henceforth, the chapter elaborates on my own curiosity and questions toward these repetitions as well as my attraction for the singularity of Sylvie’s gestural, motor and sensory self. In what follows, I try to convey that the sensuous movements and marks performed in Sylvie’s suite of 12 drawings were formed durationally, through multiple occasions, and with different bodies and materials not necessarily visible in the drawing act. For Bergson (1990), motor habits live as memories in the body and can eventually be retrieved to organize and materialize future actions (I develop this in more detail later). I am interested in tracking and paying attention to resonances and variations in repetitions traversing the three aforementioned events (see Fig. 5.3). My interest is in finding ways of thinking of repetition as difference and creation, rather than as pattern, unity and assimilation. For this, it is very important that Bergson’s focus on the body as a center of concrete activity is not misinterpreted or confused with constructivist understandings associated with the theory of schemas (Athey, 1990, 2013), which also center on children’s activity, play and repetition. The theory of schemas considers that the practice and extension of repetitive playful behaviors support children in their cognitive development, valuing an actionoriented child who is inquisitive and playful. However, the fact that children’s actions are observed for how they mirror or meet predetermined schemas reduces embodiment to representation and thus cancels the possibility of conceiving learning as an immanent process of making sense (Olsson, 2009, 2013) that keeps body and mind in co-formation. The theory of schemas is grounded on a developmental model where schemas are conceived as the stepping stone into symbolic processes like writing, or counting, or drawing shapes. However, as Cul (2015) has noted, duration could be abstracted (this is, unified in a symbolic mode) but in such a case the process of

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Fig. 5.3 Repetitions with variation across the three events: Sylvie drawing on the floor with the salt and flour, playing “witch trap” and working on drawing #1

differentiation that is intrinsic to duration becomes imperceptible. Rather than the incremental change of assimilating a new developmental milestone, duration sees change as a qualitative difference, what Bergson referred to as a difference in kind that is neither measurable, nor universal. Deleuze (1988) wrote that the most important contribution that Bergson introduced in philosophy was his concept of difference as difference in kind. The immanent movement of duration itself makes it so that time always qualitatively differences from itself. When we introduce cuts in a duration, we unavoidably render it synchronic rather than durational and confuse differences in kind (which are aesthetic, sensuous, affective) for differences in degree. Differences in degree correspond to things more than internal states. Rather than temporal, Bergson considers them as being fixed points in the space, which as such can be measured, named and represented. The task of philosophy for Bergson was “to distinguish between these nuanced differences or multiplicities, to ascertain how one difference (of degree) covers over and hides another (in kind)” (Grosz, 2004, p. 159). As many before me have discussed (e.g. De Rijke, 2019; Knight, 2012; Schulte, 2021), developmental approaches to children drawing (Gardner, 1980; Kellog, 1959; Lowenfeld, 1947; Lowenfeld & Brittain, 1984) have tended to measure, classify and unify types, schemas and stages

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in early children’s drawing and mark-making practices. Such approaches confuse differences in kind that are singular to drawing events with differences in degree. The interpretative approach that I develop for these three events centers on recognizing and tracking the flow of differences in kind and how they come to matter Sylvie’s drawings.

5.5 The Salt and Flour Play: Moving in Simultaneous and Successive Durations As I pass through the door of the 3-year-old classroom, I notice that Dunia is reading a book aloud to a group of children sitting in a circle, body against body, all tucked into the limited space of the reading center. Trying not to interrupt, I enter quietly and go to the other side of the room. Mimi, the other practitioner, peaks in and calls a few children for their toilet turn. They stand up and go. As I take off my jacket and sit, I see Jim and Sammy chatting behind the block shelves, out of Dunia’s visual field. I notice that Jim has grabbed a jar of salt from the supplies’ cabinet, which has been left open. Aware that Dunia cannot see him, Jim begins pouring salt in the floor first slowly, then with large and quick arms sways. He stops as soon as he notices that I am looking, but I smile and say nothing because I am interested to see what would happen. Soon Jim manages to pour all the salt and proceeds to do the same with a pack of flour. Sammy responds to these actions with rapid movements of feet, hands and fingers creating several marks in the dust. Then he picks up a thin wood block from the nearby shelves and begins dragging it over. Jim soon realizes that the floor has become slippery and begins to exaggeratedly slide and fall. Sammy mimics. Then, laying on the floor they extend arms and legs, and perform movements reminiscent of snow angles-swimming, gliding, and sliding with their feet, using the hollow blocks as if they were skates. The reading ends. The other children stand up, wander around, and eventually encounter Jim and Sammy behind the block shelves, covered in white dust and thrillingly playing among the salt and flour. The bodies of eight children rapidly shift and the small corner animates with a variety of simultaneous and heterogeneous activity: stomp!, slide!, drag!, scoop!, grab! pack! throw! mark! chatter! cohabiting together in undisturbed flow for more than twenty minutes. (Fig. 5.4)

This is an interesting vignette to think with Bergson’s (1990) concept of matter and how the perception of matter encompasses simultaneous and successive activity. Bergson thought matter in relation to time rather than space. Thus, matter is not understood in the terms of an object or an extension in space but as a production and aggregation of images. But these are not images in the idealistic sense of conforming representations. Neither are they in the realist sense of being images of things. Bergson understands that the perception of matter is not a question of generating disinterested knowledge that is separated from the body’s own materiality and sensation as both idealism and realism conceived, but of action. For Bergson, perception occurs to shape action (responses, reactions, recollections), not to generate knowledge. Bergson (1990) sees bodies as centers of activity that orient and gain access to other objects in the world like the salt and flour, the blocks, the block center, etc. He writes,

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Fig. 5.4 Simultaneous and successive durations in the salt and flour play

My body, then, is the aggregate of the material world, an image which acts like other images, receiving and giving back movement, with, perhaps, this difference only, that my body appears to choose, within certain limits, the manner in which it shall restore what it receives … My body, an object destined to move other objects, is, then, a center of action. (Bergson, 1990, pp. 19–20, emphasis in original)

Saying that the body is “the aggregate of the material world” is a powerful statement that characterizes the body as a surface that is oriented and composed with the surrounding world. For Bergson the world is just an ongoing flow of undifferentiated matter, or as Guerlac (2004) describes, “everything acting on everything else” (p. 109) that bodies, as mentioned above, perceive in action. But if matter is everything and all the possible images, then the problem of perception is not how it occurs but how to delimit it. Bergson (1990) argues that perception will be limited or framed by the choice of an action that serves the preservation, needs and passions of

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the body. Henceforth, Jim orientates toward the salt and flour with a framing among many possible ones. These possible framings included Dunia’s, who intended to use the salt and flour for “making natural playdough”, as she told me later. Perception does not come all at once. This is because perception is not a recognition of an idea that we have already in mind. As mentioned earlier, perception is an action and, as any action would be, it is formed in duration. In the case of the salt and flour play, we can think of Jim’s and Sammy’s initial actions of encountering, pouring and feeling with the salt and flour as the process of forming perception. In this formation we notice movements of one kind (sensory) with another kind (motor), intermingling and co-forming (Grosz, 2000). Thus, in the encounter with the salt and flour the feeling of sensory qualities like slippery, opaque, compacted, dispersible and attachable is connected and explored through actions like sliding with blocks and without them, mark-making over masses of accumulated dust, packing and throwing salt and flour “snowballs”, making snow angels, etc. (see Fig. 5.4). Performance studies scholar Cvejic (2015) describes how choreographer Le Roy developed a series of experiments trying to move with objects that had different qualities in terms of weight, elasticity, resistance and fluidity. Through his practice, Le Roy examined how the material qualities of the objects impacted his own capacities to move, transit and occupy the space of his studio. This experimentation became the basis for his choreography U. The salt and flour play seems to echo well this notion of encountering qualities in materials and exploring how a body can move and be moved when merging with them. For Bergson (1990), the potential to act is formed by the pressure of past images into the present. Perhaps images where pouring stuff on the floor could never be fully explored at the extent seen here, because wasting ingredients that are needed to produce something else, like food or natural playdough, is something that is typically avoided. Bergson mentions that perception and memory always interpenetrate, forming the possibility not to repeat the past but to differentiate it, to act differently. This occurs in a zone of indeterminacy that is connected to the possibilities of sensing and reacting to other bodies and objects in the world. All living organisms operate with indeterminacy, so to exercise choices that allow them to live well in their environments. Humans have complex nervous systems. Therefore, the indeterminacy that they negotiate is larger, with more potential of choice and action in relation to materials. I had repeatedly witnessed in Dunia and Mimi’s class, children acting in ways that seemed to speak of a sense of openness and indeterminacy where unexpected events like the salt and flour play could happen. As Grosz (2010) notes, “living bodies act not simply or mainly through deliberation or conscious decision but through indetermination, through the capacity they bring into the material world and objects to make them useful for life in ways that cannot be specified in advance” (p. 150). The force of the past is always a condition in determining a choice of action, but “the largest amount of indetermination opens the universe to become more than it is” (p. 15). The action of pouring and exploring the salt in the floor emerges from a space of indeterminacy (even if only momentaneous) where inserting an opening, a detour from previous everyday experiences with salt and flour allowed the exploration and invention of new salt and flour perspectives.

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As we read in the vignette, such exploration is key in fostering more (re)actions, making and creativity propagating through the event. Dunia and Mimi neither interrupted nor redirected the salt and flour play. Perhaps this was because clearly Jim’s choice and the transformation that it generated of matter, space, embodiment and speed spreaded and increased collective joy, energy and activity traversing the eight children present at the time. Bergson (2001) notes that being in the presence of movement provokes physical sympathy and the feeling of the easiness and grace of movement witnessed makes one move, become. Some examples that he provides are dance, a musical piece or the drawing of a curved line. In the salt and flour play, one child starting the actions of sliding with the blocks, making and throwing snowballs, creating marks over the dust instantly brought other bodies into the activity. In turn, this introduced repetition, simultaneity and variation, three aspects that characterize the multiplicity of durational time. As Grosz (2004) notes, the condition of duration is both simultaneity and succession of different durations. For Bergson, actions like the ones just mentioned only occur once. However, they create repetitions and ripplings that generate variation. At the same time, some variations in rhythm do not necessarily provoke the physical sympathy witnessed in the salt and flour play. This idea leads me to the second event, the dance of wrapping and unwrapping.

5.6 The Dance of Wrapping and Unwrapping: Tracking Qualitative Progress in Events After a while, a few of the children naturally leave the salt and flour play and gather in smaller groups in other spaces of the classroom. Sylvie, Jim, Sammy, Ian, and Jan linger on. Now Sylvie is running with a large piece of cloth that she has picked up from the dress-up center on the opposite side of the classroom. The cloth flies in the air as she traverses the space, from one wall to the other repeatedly. Soon Sylvie expands towards other classroom spaces, moving fast, with the cloth partly wrapped around her torso and the rest as a long tail, that it is dragged and undulated across the space. She ends in the reading corner. In one of her wrapping-unwrapping swirls, Sylvie falls on the floor and continues rolling and unrolling herself with the cloth. (see Fig. 5.5) But soon the cloth is seized by the group, Jim, Sammy, Ian, and Jan, who have been running after Sylvie. They all begin rolling and covering themselves on it. Words and short sentences are repeated with excitement, punctuated by screams, especially by the children who get trapped inside. Now, I hear Sylvie shouting, “The witch!” and “The witch trap”, followed by chilling shouts (see Fig. 5.6). With more bodies activating/being activated by the cloth, the game rapidly increases in speed and physicality. On one occasion, Sylvie is trapped inside alone under the fold for a while with the rest of the boys’ bodies on top. I hear her screaming in a different tone. I look at Mimi, who comes to the rescue and Sylvie leaves the game in dismay. Jim, Sammy, Ian and Jan continue wrestling and moving with the cloth. They are now standing up, tangling, untangling, stretching and snatching the cloth around their bodies (see Fig. 5.7). Mimi, who has come in and out of the event several times, now is taking pictures and annotations. She comes near me and asks, “Do you hear what they are saying?”.

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Fig. 5.5 Sylvie and the cloth in the corner of the reading center

I respond that I usually have a hard time understanding the children. Despite this, I explain that at some points I had heard Sylvie screaming “The witch!” and “The witch trap!”. I add that I cannot grasp the words the children were repeating now in front of us. Mimi clarifies that they are saying “The shark!”, “The shark!”. Suddenly, I can clearly hear it. I imagine how the wrapping and unwrapping of the cloth may feel like a shark trying to catch bodies.

This vignette is an interesting case to consider how some ways of accommodating matter relate to habit. Sylvie’s moving through space with a long piece of cloth, wrapping and unwrapping herself on it was a recursive practice. It had become one of her habits in occupying and living in the classroom and transitioning between activities and situations. As Grosz (2013) has discussed, habits more than mechanistic repetitions are examples of “contraction and synthesis of past events” (p. 220), that make the world habitable and familiar even in situations of constant change. As the event of the salt and flour play slowed down with less actions being replicated

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Fig. 5.6 Sylvie, Jim, Sammy, Ian and Jan and the witch trap game

Fig. 5.7 Jim, Ian, Jan and the shark game

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or succeeded by others, Sylvie transited out with a form of stability that kept her anchored in the environment and allowed her to go on. As I have argued earlier, perception is not about the production of knowledge but the generation of action. Action always happens in a zone of indeterminacy in which the present (perception) is shaped by the past (memory). Thus, the reaction to leave the salt and flour play is also durational. It could be a duration of slowing down, pausing or creating a new activity. For Bergson (2001), this could be done in two ways, through recollection and bodily habits, which both are locatable and invocable at the moment in time. However, retrieving a particular memory requires further effort than resourcing a habit. Since habits are grounded in repetition, they are like “memory accumulated [in the body] in order to act” (Grosz, 2013, p. 228). These effortless repetitions are key in saving energy, so this energy can be then redirected to address new issues and situations, from which new responses and creative acts emerge. Grosz (2013) provides the example of how every morning in order to gather the energy to wake up and get out of bed, we perform a series of repetitive things that we can do without requiring much thought. It is a way of saving energy to confront all the unanticipated situations that the new day will bring. Sylvie’s wrapping-unwrapping movements, the swirls, curves and waves that seem unique of many of her sensory explorations become the platform where to create new actions that, as we read in the vignette, end up forming the game of the witch trap. As we notice, this is not a completely new game, but a variation in the wrappings and unwrappings that Sylvie habitually practices by herself (see Fig. 5.5). At the same time, we notice how Sylvie’s compelling movements with the cloth are not only an expression of her own duration, but a junction point of other durations too that act and react to her movements and expressions. This is how we can explain that Jim, Sammy, Ian and Jan join in the dance of wrapping and unwrapping, not by asking Sylvie but by acting with their bodies and plugging their own rhythms into the ongoing duration. Playing the witch trap emerges from this collective joining in (see Fig. 5.6). However, as we saw with the salt and flour play, durations variate, especially when it involves a collective (Jim, Sammy, Ian, Jan, Sylvie and the cloth). This can lead to the formation of rhythms that are alien to the needs, and desires of some of the organisms implicated in the activity. Consequently, some rhythms can be experienced as a threat or potentially cause harm. They express durations in which some bodies may not feel the type of physical sympathy discussed earlier because they can no longer move graciously with them. Sylvie leaving the game light-hearted when it became more physical and brisk speaks to a duration in which she could no longer accommodate the rhythm of matter and so she needed to take pause and detach. After this, Jim, Sammy, Ian, Jan and the cloth created a new variation of the dance of wrapping and unwrapping, which revolved around a shark chasing bodies (see Fig. 5.7). The qualities defining the dance of wrapping and unwrapping as pure duration are qualities in kind. We can see how they are interpenetrated and confused qualities, composed by different modes and registers, where one movement anticipates the

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next and so on. The wrappings and unwrappings constituting Sylvie’s initial movements, the game of the witch trap and then the game of the shark chasing and eating bodies can be differentiated because they show changes in the rhythm of how bodies accommodate and act on matter and other bodies. However, they happen in a flow that keeps acquiring different nuances through duration. Taking the dance of wrapping and unwrapping as an event that not only changes in quantity (who participated, when it happened, what words were practiced, what schemas were present) but that it also shifts in quality and nuance is important to understand and recognize the emergence of the new within repetition. Children’s actions are often recognized when they can be unified under patterns. This prevents an appreciation of difference that relates to becoming and the new. Bergson applied to aesthetic events like the dance of wrapping and unwrapping the term qualitative progress. In qualitative progress what is important is to remain attentive to “the dynamic unfolding of differences in kind” (Gerlac, 2004, p. 49). Being attentive to this qualitative progress is also key in understanding how certain aesthetic qualities reappear and rematerialize in future occasions and through other modes of engagement such as drawing. I elaborate on this in the next section where I go back to Sylvie’s suite of 12 drawings.

5.7 Sylvie’s Suite of 12 Drawings: Moving with the Line Having now analyzed the salt and flour play and the dance of wrapping and unwrapping in terms of duration, multiplicity and motor habits, I hope that it is possible to sense repetition not as a repetition of the same, but repetition as qualitative progress in the aesthetic qualities traversing the three events. This variability connects with what Manning (2009) describes as the elasticity of movement’s force. She writes: An intensive figure does not represent. It durationally evokes. It provokes and propels. A figure is active transience from one form to another, a molecular mattering-form that transduces … The figure produces sensation, but not a sensation of, a sensing-with and toward. (Manning, 2009, pp. 33–34)

As an intensive figure, Sylvie draws from the pliability and elasticity of her motor habits. As we have seen in considerable detail throughout the chapter, these habits are bodied memories cultivated on multiple occasions and not only in drawing acts. These motor habits more than mechanistic gestures propel and transduce, one can feel such force in the intensity, absorption and gestural power that Sylvie brings to her drawing acts. Additionally, if Sylvie’s drawing performance produces, as Manning (2009) mentions, “a sensing-with and toward” (p. 34), then such drawings do not represent anything but act through a “gestural force that opens experience to its potential variation” (Manning, 2016, p. 1). The invoked things, “the witch trap”, “the queen house”, “the fairy house”, “a little fairy house”, “a cave trap” and “it is a trap because

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it has snow … a lot of snow” are a succession of utterances punctuated by the movement and formation of the line. This is something that echoes Ingold’s (2013) characterization of drawings as tellings, a processual coming into being not a projected representation. The humming of Frozen’s song Let it Go seems to function as a further engine propelling the movement/telling of the line, because the known rhythm of the music opens a space to inhabit and follow the line as if we could already know what it would be its next movement (Bergson, 2001). Frozen is a memory-image, a recollection that acts as a force from the past itself (e.g. the many occasions that Sylvie has sung, danced, moved Let it Go in the classroom) and comes to (in)form the drawing activity. As Myers (2019) has noted in her chapter “Kindergarten Becomes Frozen” (pp. 59–66), the song Let it Go and the piece of film that goes with it features the moment of Elsa’s liberation to be herself as a snow queen. This happens through actions like singing but also setting her tight hair in a flowing braid, changing into a lighter, more atmospheric, and swooping gown and the curvilinear gestures of arms, fingers, eyebrows in masterfully building an ice castle in the peak of a mountain covered in snow. Myers writes about the matterings of Elsa transformation among children in the preschool where she developed her study: “Elsa’s braid [acted as] a multi-scalar ‘happening’ -gathering and generating forces of various intensities” (p. 75). In tune with Myers’ study (2019), I also understand that Elsa’s empowering transformation and generative curvilinear movements are a powerful force that moves Sylvie. I had seen Sylvie humming and singing Frozen multiple times before this occasion, moving around the classroom wrapping and unwrapping herself in a flowing cloth, swaying, looping, folding, in movements that clearly seek to sympathize and move with Elsa’s grace (Bergson, 2001). Possibly, if we placed a piece of mylar paper over the screen and traced Elsa’s movements during the aforementioned scene we would end with a series of encircling, looping, swaying lines resonant with Sylvie’s marks and movements. As Grosz (2006) notes, Bergson (1990) was concerned with exploring the ways memory as body habit meets, combines and welds with memory as a recollection of images. Bergson affirmed that specific recollections are the ones brought to the present because they are the ones more useful to orient the action. Perhaps, Sylvie recollected Elsa’s affirmative and transformational curvilinear lines both as a memory-image and a motor habit to shape her own activity of moving and drawing, of inhabiting the classroom in ways that affectively attuned to Elsa’s power. For Bergson images that are recollected are not represented but engaged through action. The tones and nuances of the engagement may vary in response to each moment and their own differencing qualities of time as duration. Considering this, Let it Go could be what Bergson (1990) described as a clustered point of memory that helps connecting to other memories and motor habits, being a propulsor for the creation of new activity.

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5.8 Concluding Thoughts: Sympathizing with Children’s Drawings Bergson (2001) articulates the relation with art as one based on sympathy, in which the feeling of an art piece happens by recognizing and entering its rhythms. His position is that an aesthetic experience emerges out of a process of following the progressive and confounded transformation of qualities in kind, not by recognizing eternal images of beauty being present in the work of art. There may be something about this concept of sympathy for attuning differently to children and processes of mark-making so to see these processes as much more than platforms for emergent symbolizations. I am suggesting this because Sylvie did something as I observed her drawing that transformed my position as participant observer and put me to follow her movements and rhythms, approaching me to the experience of sympathy that Bergson describes. Below is the final paragraph in the vignette that I wrote about Sylvie’s suite of 12 drawings describing the happening that altered our relation in the field: When Sylvie notices that I have taken a few pictures of her drawings, she stops and looks at me with aggravation. “I am busy. Drawing. This is the drawing table!”. I take the statement as a blunt confirmation of my intrusive attitude. While I did not want to trouble Sylvie, I was resistant to stop my observations. So, I put away my camera and tried instead to follow Sylvie’s activity by imitating it in my notepad (Fig. 5.8). After all, Sylvie had commanded me to use the drawing table for drawing. So I did.

In following and imitating Sylvie’s lines with my own body, I stopped being the sovereign subject that observes from the outside, interprets and documents the child. I inhabited what Manning (2009) describes as the interval, where the body encounters and coexists with other durations external to it. Although I sought to move with Sylvie’s lines, we had never moved together before and I was not habituated to the ease and speed of her large gestural movements. However, this withness (Manning, 2009) made me feel that there was a condensation of memories in her motor habits that as a different body I could not recollect (see Fig. 5.8). The drawings in my notes provide a poor testimony of Sylvie’s practice of carrying/being carried by the line. Such poorness stems from the fact that Sylvie and I are two different bodies, with different durations and without previous experiences of moving together. Despite this limitation, in the making of these graphs and jottings I tangentially felt in my own body the gracefulness of Sylvie’s movements and lines and the matter energizing them. Drawing and moving with Sylvie made me think of what Atkinson (2018) describes as a pedagogical practice of mutual translation, “in which the teacher reaching out to the learner’s form of expression can change the teacher’s framework of understanding” (p. 19). This is, changing the understanding that these series of drawings are just a repetition of the same schema, or a repetition of the same motifs and representations, such as the same curved lines, song and witch’s trap story. The pedagogical relation that Atkinson proposes localizes in duration, “the immanence of local events of encounter” (p. 19), such as the three events examined in the chapter, and how they provoke wonder, new forms of

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Fig. 5.8 Two pages of Laura’s notebook featuring the processes of Sylvie’s drawings #3, #4 and #5

attention and opportunities for transformation, such as the opportunity to learn in the withness of Sylvie’s body and lines. In the history of the study of children’s drawing, drawings have commonly been thought as a child’s intentional act. The child as an agent is often called to speak, recognize, name and narrate her marks. UK’s guiding practice with 3-year olds recommends teachers to invite children to talk about their drawings as a way to localize emerging symbolization (DfE, 2021). As Manning (2016) suggests, volition can only be narrated after the fact. In such narration we can only recognize similarities and patterns, but not variation, nuance and minor gestures, or in Bergson’s (2001) language, differences in kind. As I have argued, these are much harder to perceive and value, one must track smaller shifts and follow duration. One must consider that different events and singular activities, like drawing, could be interpenetrated by durations that are already flowing, making and acting. With the concept of duration, plus the interconnected concepts of matter, memory, perception, indeterminacy and action, I have offered an alternative approach to how young children’s drawings come to matter which features non-linear temporalities; locates qualitative change and nuance in repetition; and, avoids a representational approach to drawing by not connecting perception to knowledge generation but instead to action. Thereby, I have set the focus on processes of becoming, creating and encountering the new, over the tendency to fix children drawings in the recognition and annotation of representational features such as letters, words, numbers, things and other symbols that are often abstracted from the ongoing materiality of the world in which they are composed.

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References Athey, C. (1990). Extending thought in young children: A parent-teachers partnership. Sage. Athey, C. (2013). Beginning with the theory about schemas. In K. Mairs & C. Arnold (Eds.). Young children learning through schemas: Deepening the dialogue about learning in the home and in the nursery (pp. 5–16). Routledge. Atkinson, D. (2018). Art, disobedience, and ethics: The adventure of pedagogy. Palgrave Macmillan. Barad, K. (2008). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. In S. Alaimo & S. Heickman (Eds.), Material feminisms (pp. 120–154). Indiana University Press. Berger, J.‚ & Savage, J. (2005). Berger on drawing. Occasional Papers. Bergson, H. (1990). Matter and memory: Essay on the relation between the body and the mind. (N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer, Trans.). Zone Books. (Original work published 1888). Bergson, H. (2001). Time and free will: An essay on the data of immediate consciousness. (F. L. Pogson, Trans.). Dover Publications. (Original work published 1896). Cull Ó Maoilearca, L. (2015). Theatres of immanence: Deleuze and the ethics of performance. Palgrave MacMillan. Cvejic, B. (2015). Choreographing problems: Expressive concepts in European contemporary dance and performance. Palgrave Macmillan. de Freitas, E., & Ferrara, F. (2016). Matter, movement and memory. In N. Snaza, D. Sonu, S. E. Truman, & Z. Zaliwska (Eds.), Pedagogical matters: New materialisms and curriculum studies (pp. 43–58). Peter Lang. Deleuze, G. (1988). Bergsonism. (B. Habberjam and Hugh Tomlinson, Trans.). Zone Books. Department of Education. (2021). Development Matters: Non-statutory curriculum guidance for the early years foundation stage. Department of Education Publishing Service. Retrieved August 15, 2021‚ from https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/att achment_data/file/1004234/Development_Matters_Non-statutory_Curriculum_Guidance_Revi sed_July_2021.pdf De Rijke, V. (2019). ‘It might get messy or not be right’: Scribble as postdevelopmental art. In M. Sakr & J. Osgood (Eds.), Postdevelopmental approaches to childhood art (pp. 153–176). Bloomsbury. Eely, P. (2014). If you couldn’t see me: the drawings of Trisha Brown. Walker Living Collection Catalogue. Retrieved August 21, 2021, from http://walkerart.org/collections/publications/perfor mativity/drawings-of-trisha-brown/ Freeman, E. (2019). Beside you in time: Sense methods and queer sociabilities in the American 19th Century. Duke University Press. Gardner, H. (1980). Artful scribbles: The significance of children drawings. Jill Norman Grosz, E. (2000). Deleuze’s Bergson: Duration, the virtual and a politics of the future. In I. Buchanan & C. Colebrook (Eds.), Deleuze and feminist theory (pp. 214–234). Edinburgh University Press. Grosz, E. (2004). The nick of time: Politics, evolution and the untimely. Duke University Press. Grosz, E. (2008). Chaos, territory, art: Deleuze and the framing of the earth. Columbia University Press. Grosz, E. (2010). Feminism, materialism and freedom. In D. Coole & S. Frost (Eds.), New materialisms: Ontology, agency and politics (pp. 139–157). Duke University Press. Grosz, E. (2013). Habit today: Ravaisson, Bergson, Deleuze and Us. Body & Society, 19(2&3), 217–239. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X12472544 Guerlac, S. (2004). Thinking in time: An introduction to Henri Bergson. Cornell University Press. Hackett, A., MacLure, M., & McMahon, S. (2020). Reconceptualizing early language development: Matter, sensation and the more-than-human. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2020.1767350 Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Routledge. Kellog, R. (1959). What children scribble and why. NP Publishers.

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Kind, S. (2018). Collective improvisations: The emergence of the early childhood studio as an event-full place. In C. M. Schulte & C. M. Thompson (Eds.), Communities of practice: Art, play and aesthetics in early childhood (pp. 5–21). Springer. Knight, L. (2012). Grotesque gestures or sensuous signs? Rethinking notions of apprenticeship in early childhood. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 33(1), 101–111. https:// doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2012.632170 Knight, L. (2013). Not as it seems: Using Deleuzian concepts of the imaginary to rethink children’s drawing. Global Studies of Childhood, 3(3), 254–264. https://doi.org/10.2304/gsch.2013.3.3.254 Kuby, C. R. & Gutshall Rucker, T. (2016). Go be a writer!: Expanding the curricular boundaries of literacy learning with children. Teachers College Press. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2009). Going beyond the theory/practice divide in early childhood education: Introducing an intra-active pedagogy. Routledge. Lowenfeld, V. (1947). Creative and mental growth. Macmillan Co. Lowenfeld, V., & Brittain, L. (1984). Creative and mental growth (4th edition). Macmillan. MacLure, M. (2013). The wonder of data. Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies, 13(4), 228– 232. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708613487863 MacLure, M. (2016). The refrain of the a-grammatical child: Finding another language in/for qualitative research. Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies, 16(2), 173–182. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/1532708616639333 Manning, E. (2009). Relationscapes: Movement, art, philosophy. The MIT Press. Manning, E. (2016). The minor gesture. Duke University Press. Moss, P. (2014). Transformative change and real utopias in early childhood education: A story of democracy, experimentation and potentiality. Routledge. Moss, P. (2019). Alternative narratives in early childhood: An introduction for students and practitioners. Routledge. Murris, K. (2016). The posthuman child: Educational transformation through philosophy with picturebooks. Routledge. Myers, C. (2019). Children and materialities: The force of the more-than-human in children’s classroom lives. Springer. Olsson, L. M. (2009). Movement and experimentation in young children’s learning: Deleuze and Guattari in early childhood education. Routledge. Olsson, L. M. (2013). Taking children’s question seriously: The need for creative thought. Global Studies of Childhood, 3(3), 230–253. https://doi.org/10.2304/gsch.2013.3.3.230 Osgood, J. (2019). Materialized reconfigurations of gender in early childhood: Playing seriously with Lego. In J. Osgood & K. H. Robinson (Eds.), Feminist researching gendered childhoods: Generative entanglements (pp. 85–108). Bloomsbury. Sauvagnargues, A. (2016). Artmachines: Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon. (S. Verderber and E. W. Holland, Trans.). Edinburgh University Press. (Original work published 2003). Schulte, C. (2021). Childhood drawing: The making of a deficit aesthetic. Global Studies of Childhood, 11(1), 54–68. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043610621995821 Sellers, M. (2013). Young children becoming curriculum: Deleuze. Routledge. Tesar, M. (2016). Timing childhoods: An alternative reading of children’s development through philosophy of time, temporality, place and space. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 17(4), 399–408. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463949116677924 Tesar, M., Farquhar, S., Gibbons, A., Myers, C., & Bloch, M. (2016). Childhoods and time: Rethinking notions of temporality in early childhood education. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 17(4), 359–366. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463949116677931 Thiel, J. J. (2018). ‘A cool place where we make stuff’: Co-curating relational spaces of muchness. In C. M. Schulte & C. M. Thompson (Eds.), Communities of practice: Art, play and aesthetics in early childhood (pp. 5–21). Springer. Trafí-Prats, L., & Caton, L. (2020). Towards an ethico-aesthetic of parenting: Sensing ritornellos of play with GoPro data. Genealogy, 4(2), 34. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy4020034

Chapter 6

Drawing and Being Drawn by the Hand: A Dance of Animacy Sylvia Kind

Abstract This visual essay narrates events of drawing in the early childhood studio with four- and five-year-old children during the coronavirus pandemic. It considers what drawings do, how they draw us to attention, and how we were drawn to the hand. We draw the hand, not as an appendage or shape, but as the hand that holds, loves, leads, is touched as it touches, and has particular potency in these times of the coronavirus. It explores drawing as feeling-knowing and close attention, and drawing in movement, through touch, and with growing bodied attunement and immersive listening. We become increasingly attuned to what is animating this attention to hands, how the hand both expresses and hides identities, plays with multiple becomings, and how the drawn lines lead, interweave, and knot together in correspondence with various situations, speculations, and concerns. The events take shape as a dance of animacy. Keywords Early childhood · Drawing as event · Correspondence · Feeling-knowing · Coronavirus

6.1 The Hope of Drawing In the early childhood studio, drawing is not just about the moment of mark making when pen or pencil meets paper and an image begins to form. Drawing moves within the relation of things, in the midst of other happenings and inventions. Drawing entangles us as it moves throughout the studio and between children, weaving together various situations, speculations, and concerns. Arriving at an image (Kentridge, 2014) includes marks, materialities, animations, bodies in motion, stops and starts, intertextualities, wanderings and re-turnings, alterations, synergies, rhythms, and temporalities. Drawings arrive, wander, and lead, rendering a drawing more than a “picture” of something or a stable or direct re-presentation of what a child feels, thinks, or knows. I consider drawing always speculative and partial, working with a repertoire S. Kind (B) Capilano University, North Vancouver, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Trafí-Prats and C. M. Schulte (eds.), New Images of Thought in the Study of Childhood Drawing, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07143-0_6

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of other lines and renderings, pausing momentarily at this rendition, leading and reaching toward future drawings, hopeful of becoming something more. As Ingold (2013) insists, drawing is “committed to carrying on” (p. 127). And so, as we draw together, I ask could drawing be more than this? Where could it take us? The artist William Kentridge (2014) describes how in drawing there always is the hope for something new to arrive, something unguarded and spectacular. To draw is to hope for “a diagram of a galaxy in cobalt violet” (p. 176) but what emerges becomes fixed in this particular moment and mark and never quite attains that hoped for vibrant galaxy. He describes how drawing begins when he is “circling the studio” (p. 176) and everything is possible. There is hope for something new and captivating, but instead with the arrival of this image, all other possibilities are temporarily stilled. This suggests that drawing, always in a state of becoming, is full of hope and possibility: hope for the arrival of something more vibrant, a pulsating other world, a desire to become more than we already are, to be enlarged, and to find ourselves immersed in something that will change us and change our way of seeing. If we see drawing as a skill or individual personal expression this could easily lead to constant disappointment as if this particular drawing is never enough, but I stay with the hope of drawing and the hope that drawing could take us somewhere. What would it take to keep this hope alive?

6.2 The Pulse of a Project For the past 10 months, I have been working in the studio with Johanna, an early childhood educator in the campus Children’s Centre, and a small group of four- and five-year-old children. We began in the fall with a focus on drawing the human body prompted by children’s frequent figure drawings and their desire to figure out how to draw ears, noses, and feet. The university was quiet as all classes were in remote delivery due to the coronavirus, and we were fortunate to have the use of the large empty adult-studio classroom. Each morning as the children arrived, the open, expansive, light-filled room prompted running, jumping, twirling, tumbling, and a continuous chorus of “look what I can do!” We began to work with this impulse, inviting improvisations and movements between drawing and bodied performances, engaging the sensing-moving body and thinking in movement. We documented the events with notations, transcribed conversations, and photographs which were mounted on large panels that began to fill the room. Soon we were surrounded by images drawn and photographed. We noticed how the photographs prompted particular animacies. As children paused with a photo of themselves in an attempted handstand or summersault, they reciprocated with other bodied inventions. Rather than simply holding meaning or acting as a memory of past encounters, the photos provoked re-enactments and re-animations, and asked for improvisational bodied responses and re-translations. We respond to this by making available mirrors, stethoscopes, magnifying glasses, and other materials to help propel other ways of listening and responding.

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After a few weeks, the project takes a turn with an inconsequential question, a photograph, and an injury. A child pauses during drawing and quietly wonders, “how do I draw a hand?” I respond by photographing his hand in an invitation to look closely, to leave a trace of his question, and to engage others in this quest. The click of the camera draws others to attention and a chorus of “look what my hands can do!” echoes through the group. The children’s hands respond to each other in gestures resulting in multiple inventions and reinventions which I photograph as well. I join with this and include a photo of my hand with a recently injured and bandaged finger. This is a co-composed project, not child-led or teacher-directed, but events of mutual improvisation and responsiveness. We have cultivated a way of being together in the studio where we, children and educators, are in movement with each other and are part of the emergent dance and choreography together. Careful, and with sensitivity, we are part of what takes place (Fig. 6.1).

Fig. 6.1 “Look what my hands can do!”

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My outstretched hand, the camera’s focus on my finger, and the click of the shutter draw attention to my injury. One injury echoes with others as sleeves and pant legs are pulled up to show bruised knees and elbows, shoes and socks removed to show bumped toes, and other bandaged cuts and scrapes. The attention travels with the children at the end of the morning as they return to the Children’s Centre. Arya in particular carries this concern with her, creating several drawings of my hand over the week while wondering “Why did Sylvia cut her finger? Why wasn’t she careful?” She brings one of these drawings to the studio the next time we are together. We gather around her drawing, reconsider my now unbandaged yet still evidently injured finger, and Arya responds by redrawing my hand while carefully considering the resonance between my injury and her drawing. She pauses, inspects the drawn-wound, traces it briefly with her finger, and in an act of care, draws a bandage around it. Every small act seems to propel itself toward something more. We encounter many other representational problems such as how to draw “connectors” such as elbows and knees, and the insides and outsides of a body, such as inside a mouth, the brain, a skeleton, and a foot in a shoe. But the attention to hands remains a force as children try to figure out how to draw hands holding things, such as a cracker, seeds, a dragonfly, and even an eye, and how to draw two hands holding, particularly a little sister holding a mother’s hand. We move between enacting and drawing, thinking through the body as we collectively try to address these drawing problems. The bodied feeling-knowing allows children to momentarily become the drawing. How one holds, the quality of the touch, and how the fingers join with others matter as the hands tell of the relations and the particular configurations show care, friendship, and love. These are things known in their sentient relations, and the drawings propose wonderings of what it means to touch and be touched, to hold and be held, and to be intertwined with others. We can be concerned with what drawings represent, the meaning of the marks, the stories they tell, and the processes by which they come into being, but here I’m interested in what drawings do, how they draw us to attention, and how they lead us and weave between the photos, enactments, and wonderings creating events of attention. Ingold (2013) writes “to correspond with the world…is not to describe it, or to represent it, but to answer to it” (p. 108). And so, we stay in the movements, and in the play of drawing and its performativities and try to join with and continue to activate this draw to the hand.

6.3 Drawing and Being Drawn by the Hand The coronavirus is rarely directly addressed in conversations and drawings but it is a constant and lingering presence and a defining force. It is in the frequent directives to wash and sanitize hands, to stay at a distance, and refrain from touching, emphasizing hands as a potential risk and contaminant. Yet there is such tenderness and intimacy in the photos and drawings—the variant, often delicate and tenuous lines in the pen drawings, the ways they leave traces of a child’s hand both in the image and the actions, and how the photos animate the hand and its generosity and expressiveness.

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We shifted to drawing with black fine line pens as they made the nuances of the lines more visible, rendering more delicately the sensitivity of the drawn and drawing hand, highlighting the aesthetic force of the lines and images, while creating a beautiful divergence from social distancing and the hesitancies of touching. As Ingold (2013) describes, not only does the hand have unique sentient capacities, it also “tells stories of the world in its gestures and in its written or drawn traces” (p. 112), and tells of a body’s attentiveness. Thus, we draw the hand, not as an appendage or shape, but as the hand that holds, loves, leads, reaches, refuses, speaks, hurts, helps, invents, responds, mediates, encounters, is touched as it touches, and has particular potency in these times of the coronavirus (Fig. 6.2). Erin Manning (2007) describes touch as a gesture of turning toward or reaching toward, a movement, a tenuous, ephemeral exposure of oneself to the other. She writes, “I touch not to be accident, but with a determination to feel you, to reach you, to be affected by you” (pp. 37–38). The tender touch of the children’s hands is

Fig. 6.2 Drawing the hand

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felt in the photos, in the attentive stillness of moments of drawing, in the responsive enactments, and in the renderings and drawn lines. We are moved in response and I am drawn in and captivated (Fig. 6.3). Johanna sits on the floor in front of panels of drawings and photos and considers the images with Maia. Silently, without words, she points to a photo and in slow, fluid, dance-like movements, echoes the configurations with her own hands, bringing each hand-image to life, making visible the expressive, improvisational, gesturing hand. Maia, sitting on her lap, nods in agreement, points to other images, and joins with Johanna in a slow-motion responsive choreography. Over time other children join in the wordless conversations and we add a large mirror to play with and multiply the participants in these events of echo and response. Photos, drawings, hands, children, educators, and mirror-children play together. In these instances, we are not looking

Fig. 6.3 Slow-motion choreographies

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at the images trying to decipher their intents and meanings, rather we are looking with, and joining with the images in correspondence with their propositions. In the same way, rather than addressing the hand as a topic to explore, or even exploring how children are making sense of the riskiness of the touch of the hands touch during the pandemic, the effort is to stay in the movements, to respond to, improvise with, and join with this draw to the hand. As Berger (2011) describes, we begin to draw when “prompted by something asking to be drawn” (p. 6). As the photos affect and move us, the drawings draw us, the animate, gesturing hands open us to questions of what can hands do? What can hands say? Our weekly studio sessions take on rhythms of gathering, re-considering, and drawing as we collectively respond and attend to what is being activated and given attention. Multiple renditions of hands begin to take shape through conversations, drawings, and photographs as we consider what hands do, can be, or say. There are love hands, mystery hands, hello hands, praying hands, hurt hands, flower hands, holding hands, and many more. We document this in our notations and the list grows longer every week (Figs. 6.4 and 6.5). Each re-reading of this list prompts dramatizations and new inventions as we review the photos, re-enact and re-draw the propositions. And as the discussions turn to the many ways one can draw a hand, each speculation sparks other possibilities and experimentations and highlights the rich synergies between the drawn and drawing hand. The list starts out conventionally: you can draw a hand by tracing it, and by looking at it and drawing what you see. This leads to many other ways of looking and listening. Arya, for instance, traces the outline of Johanna’s fingers with one hand, drawing what she feels with the other. Elena offers a stethoscope to Johanna who puts the ear tips in her ears. Elena slowly traces the chest piece over the contours of her own hand, tracing the back of her hand, fingers, and wrist. As the stethoscope moves a line is drawn and she seems acutely aware of the action of moving with the pen, the line tracing a way of hearing and seeing the hand. Arya joins the processes and with the stethoscope ear tips in her ears, takes a pen and begins to draw as Johanna slowly traces the contours of her own fingers with the chest piece. Arya draws without looking at Johanna’s hand in slow rhythmic attention. Max, listens to his hand, leaning in, body still, tracing the stethoscope over his hand in deep attention. Then as Johanna moves the stethoscope for him, he draws the lines of what he hears. The lines wander, in zig zags and loops, creating slow pathways of attention on the paper. These are instances of intense sensitivity and attention, drawing in movement, through touch, and with growing bodied attunement and immersive listening (Fig. 6.6). We become increasingly attuned to what is animating this attention to hands. There is the still constant chorus of “look what I can do!” along with the desire to experiment with what is generated, the pleasure of collective improvisations, the perpetual interest in working through certain drawing proposals while inventing with what drawing can be and become and what it might mean to attend to the touch, sensations, and life of the hand. There is the vitality of the photographs and what they do in the acts of noticing and how they have a dynamic presence in the room,

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Fig. 6.4 What can hands say?

along with the allure of the drawings themselves, and the force of the coronavirus and hand hygiene in sustaining this attention. We join with the force and flow of things and the entanglements of being, becoming, listening-drawing, and feeling-knowing as we draw together.

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Fig. 6.5 Reviewing and discussing notations and drawings

6.4 The Mystery Hand We find our way to mystery hands. In the midst of many other figurations it’s the possibility of mystery that takes hold of us for several months. While other expressions of hands that we had noted can be described and illustrated through words, stories, enactments, and drawings, none of the children have explanations for what

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Fig. 6.6 Listening to the hand

a mystery hand might be. Its unknowability, formlessness, and intrigue prompt long silences when we try to generate conversations about it. There is little interest in describing a mystery hand verbally or through drawing as if explaining or showing it would render it no longer mysterious. We try a few propositions, but as Max insists, to figure out what a mystery is would make it an “un-mystery”. But the making of a mystery holds a particular fascination. At my wondering of how we could make a mystery or a mystery hand, Arya immediately slides under the low wooden platform that we are gathered around, hands tucked underneath her out of sight with the announcement, “This is how you make a mystery hand!” This soon morphs into vibrant games of drawing mysteries. Papers are folded up with drawn-mysteries inside, drawings are hidden under other drawings, and hands are drawn with slight distortions to disrupt their recognizability. Children move throughout the room as if in an effort to find the right space to compose mysteries, eventually converging in a

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“mystery place” under the podium at the front of the classroom. It is somewhat dark and secluded under the podium with just enough space for a few children to gather underneath (Fig. 6.7).

Fig. 6.7 Mystery-hand drawings

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Max draws his own hand while slipping it out from the hiding place under the podium while declaring it to be another child’s drawing. This generates lots of laughter and drawn responses. Later, he draws his own hand while printing another child’s name on the page. This becomes a “tricky” drawing, then a tricker, double tricker, and triple tricker, as Max, Arya, Heide, and Minjei join together in composing other mystery hand drawings. Max traces his hand and Arya and Heide add their names. Arya draws Max’s hand and writes a combination of three other names alongside. Max draws his hand and experiments with writing his name backward, and collectively the children join together to generate mystery identities by recombining a few letters from each of their names. The hand suggests the essence of the drawer in the quality of the marks, and in the intimate relation of touch, gesture, body, and drawing. Yet in the play between the drawing and the drawn hand, one meaning or identity is exchanged for another so that the hand both expresses and hides identities, not just in the image, but in the act and actions of making the marks and drawing the lines. These drawings and games of mis-identities generate immense delight and multiple variations, and as Max proposes, offer possibilities to “draw what I am not”. To join with these experimentations, Johanna photocopies several of the children’s hand drawings. Photocopied, multiplied, cut out, and in a collection together the hands become separated from who made them and offer possibilities for new becomings. The cut out hands are gathered in the “mystery place”, where children tape them on to their hands, and crawling out from behind the podium, games of guessing who one has become begin to take shape. It is as if once a new hand is attached one becomes completely unrecognizable (Fig. 6.8). Cut out these hand drawings take on a new life. The delight is in how the hand plays with the possibility of multiple becomings where identity can be playful and fluid. As Cristina Delgado Vintimilla (personal communication, July 24, 2021) suggests, trying out these different hands becomes a play between the child and the world— between a trace, the shape of a line, the world, and a body; as if a new body would emerge through trying out a particular hand, with the hand leading to new possibilities, reflecting Ingold’s (2013) proposition that a line “leads as much as it is led” (p. 128). We linger in these mysteries. Even when we gather to revisit the mystery drawings and ways of drawing and reconfiguring the hand, there is an instinctual move to hiding under chairs or covering oneself under jackets and clothing, as if one needs to be in a state of mystery to even talk about it. As Ingold (2013), referring to Berger, describes, “You become what you draw; not in shape but in affect” (p. 129). What seems to matter is the performative enactive nature of drawing, and the desire of drawing to speculate and propose possible states of being, to address what is known and unknowable, to refigure the impossible, to disrupt the certainty of self, to be in the mystery, to become the mysterious, and dwell in-the-making of mysteries.

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Fig. 6.8 New becomings

6.5 A Dance of Animacy Throughout this project, drawings take shape in the intertwining of gestural and bodied enactments, moving between and among children, in the recursive flux and flows of photos, spaces, materials, and ideas. The elements are not so much acting on each other, rather moving with, in a dance of varying rhythms, intensities, tempos, and alliances, and “responding to one other in counterpoint, alternately as melody and refrain” (Ingold, 2011, p. 215). Ingold (2013) describes this “dance of animacy” (p. 101) as a corresponding polyphony, much like a kite caught up in the force of the wind and taking flight, in which “bodily kinesthesia interweaves contrapuntally with the flux of materials within an encompassing, morphogenic field of forces” (p. 101).

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The drawings themselves have a transitory quality, and appear somewhat unfinished, still in process, with their lines still trailing off in an open expectancy. Yet the drawings have been central in this animate dance, circulating in movement and propelling toward other drawings, taking shape through improvisational processes of working things out as they go along. It is drawing that has led this attention to the hand, sustaining it, moving it along, and leading to each speculative proposition. The instances of drawing act as a momentary pause, giving propositional form to circulating ideas, offering a space of attention. Each drawing seems to propose a “what if” before carrying on. The drawings move like lines connecting, weaving, winding, and leading, activated by the intense attention to hand hygiene, while bringing vibrant visibility to the inventive, mysterious, listening, hand (Fig. 6.9). I am moved by the gestures and traces of the drawing hand, the boldness of the laughing “tricker” lines, the wandering listening lines, the slowness, care, and

Fig. 6.9 The drawn and drawing hand

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assurance in drawing an injured hand, the steady certainty of tracing one’s own hand, the hesitancy and delicacy of the first free-hand drawings, and the intimacy and mutuality of touch in drawing another’s hand. There are lines that run as Maia enacts the lines drawn on the page and shows us how they move by orchestrating a dance-like composition around the room, tracing the drawn lines with her feet; lines that whisper and shout as children read back the lines in their drawings that trace the stethoscope’s path; lines that tangle, interweave, and knot together in correspondence with the movements and mysteries, felt in the body, woven between children and photographs, in gestural bodied haptic correspondence; like a kite in flight, moving in undulations, surges, swells, dips, and turns while caught up in the currents of the pandemic. As the project comes to a close with the arrival of summer, the hand remains as an invitational gesture, beckoning to me in the studio, the expressiveness of children’s hands and the beautiful fluidity and variability of the hand-drawn lines still drawing me, persuading me to find a way to carry on.

References Berger, J. (2011). Bento’s sketchbook: How does the impulse to draw something begin? Pantheon. Ingold, T. (2011). Being alive: Essays on movement. Routledge. Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, archeology, art, and architecture. Routledge. Kentridge, W. (2014). Six drawing lessons. Harvard University Press. Manning, E. (2007). Politics of touch: Sense, movement, sovereignty. University of Minnesota Press.

Chapter 7

Strawing: Perpetual Line Lucy Hill and Alice Lyons

This visual essay works with photographs which document a series of drawing workshops for 2–4-year-old children and their adults, as part of Lucy’s Early Years Artist Residency at The Ark Cultural Centre for Children in Dublin. The Strawing was created by children and adults together over a weekend in the gallery space using white paper straws. In addition to those attending the four, timed, early years workshops, children of all ages also contributed to the Strawing as it hung in the gallery over the weekend, including The Ark Children’s Council. For this visual essay, Alice’s work with words and drawing as artistwriterpoet informs a new direction for the straws where they can tangle with Lucy’s interest in posthuman theory and the possibilities it offers education practices (Snaza et al., 2014; Taylor & Hughes, 2016) to focus on artistic affect (Davies, 2014; HickeyMoody & Page, 2015; Hickey-Moody et al., 2021) and ideas of material agency (Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010; Coole & Frost, 2010). During the workshops, the Strawing method became self-explanatory and as such, was both visually and manually shared by adults and children alike, through gesture, tactile connection, and a few spoken words. In fact, instruction for the Strawing felt issued by the straws themselves, through their potential to extend into the gallery space. The Strawing morphed, misbehaved, grew shoots, collapsed, and re-grew. A parallel linear ghost grew alongside from the shadows cast by the play between light and straws on walls, ceiling, and floor. Manual gesture became readable in line, echoed rhythmically by the shadows. L. Hill (B) Independent Artist, Westport, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] A. Lyons Atlantic Technological University, Sligo, Ireland

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Like a game whose conditions are defined only by material boundaries, the Strawing remained steadfastly tethered to the rules of drawing practice, as a process of adding, erasing, fixing, defining, and extending space with line. What developed within the gallery, both inside and outside of the workshops, was a dynamic, non-representational construction where infrequently issued language adapted to new voices and drawing desires. Children and adults were equally complicit in this over-riding of any reliance on discursive motivation and rather were moved by the Strawing-making process itself, materially, spatially, bodily, ideationally, giddily, to connect and disconnect, to each other and to the gallery space. The collaborative Strawings’ exciting refusal to form a fixed or coherent representation encouraged us (Lucy and Alice) to think more about our interest in the essential materiality of language and the poetic possibilities inherent in both the collective practice of drawing and in our collaborative writing about it. As an additional layer, Íde, Alice’s four-year-old drawing companion, reignited the Strawing process in Alice’s kitchen during lockdowns in County Sligo. Íde helped to move the Strawing on in new directions, her voice then stitched itself into the structure of our writing, guiding us toward clarity in remembering and recounting our material explorations. For us, drawing collectively with children can be a way to participate in a visual parallel to the activity of poetry, which is, in large part, play with the materiality of language, but also a drive toward an Íde-esque desire for extension, connection, play, and precision. Drawing with children brings us to a very parallel place to the ongoing acquisition of language, which is not limited to infancy, but happens through social contact, imitation, play, trial and error, and exploration. In her book Lyric Poetry: the pain and pleasure of words Mutlu Konuk Blasing (2007) writes about lyric poetry and language acquisition in a way that is very resonant to us, particularly when thinking about drawing as a radically democratic practice that is grounded in scribble, doodle, and mark-making. Blasing says that “poetic language remembers the history that constitutes a speaking subject in a given language” (pp. 12–13). We think that drawing line holds a similar kind of memory. For us, connecting drawing with poetry, in all possible directions, carries important implications for their understanding. Blasing again helps us toward this where she writes, When poetry construes the symbolic function and logical operation as kinds of games one can play with language—right alongside wordplays and rhymes—all superstructures, all claims to extralinguistic ‘truths’ are in jeopardy. (Blasing, 2007, p. 3)

Similarly, it seems to us that extending into rational, logical, physical, space through a rhythmic intentional drawing line in two (and three) dimensions holds a similar playful poetic potential to mess with the foundations of spatial sense. Blasing (2007) goes on to say: The threat of poetry is not a threat of anarchy, for the autonomous stringent orders of the linguistic are evident. Rather, it is the threat of a different system underwriting—and therefore in effect overruling—the order of reason. What imperils rational language is what enables it: a nonrational linguistic system that is logically and genetically prior to its rational deployment. (Blasing, 2007, p. 1)

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Blasing’s construction of the non-rational as ‘prior’ absolutely refutes any equivalence to the primitive or underdeveloped. This leads us to think that nonrepresentational drawing, mark-making, scribble (and so, also by extension, Strawing in three dimensions), can operate on this same prior plane which, offers an experience of another kind of order, a system that operates independently of the production of the meaningful discourse that it enables. This is a mechanical system with its own rules, procedures and history. It works with a kind of logic that is oblivious to discursive logic. (Blasing, 2007, p. 2)

Blasing’s notion of history in relation to the acquisition of language, when considered in close relation to non-representational processes of drawing and mark-making helps us to push against the normative ‘developmental’ lens through which children’s drawing is often seen. Alice has written elsewhere that “lyric poetry is a cultural practice that springs from language’s inextricable link with physicality, incarnation, and embodiment. Seen in this way, a lyric poem is an embodied text” (Lyons, 2014, p. 24). Similarly, the Strawing became seen by us as a poetic text, made through multiple collaborative, shared materialities, moved by diverse gestures and desires which collided and split at endlessly varying speeds. Our visual essay situates drawing with children, as a mode of perpetually mobile poetic weaving, consciously and bodily, through time and space, between sense and non-sense. Finally, as all that remains of the Strawing, the photographs which we work with in this visual essay, as accidental, yet agential “minor” data (Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2018; Manning, 2016; Nordstrom, 2015) become re-enlivened through our collaborative thinking-writing-drawing, to resist the notion of data generated through and with, art and children, as fixed or fixable forms of sedentary truth.

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References Barad, K. M. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press. Blasing, M. K. (2007). Lyric poetry: The pain and the pleasure of words. Princeton University Press. Coole, D., & Frost, S. (2010). New materialisms: Ontology, agency, and politics. Duke University Press. Davies, B. (2014). The affective flows of art-making. Occasional Paper Series, 31. Bank Street Occasional Papers, https://educate.bankstreet.edu/occasional-paper-series/vol2014/iss31/3 Hickey-Moody, A., & Page, T. (Eds.). (2015). Arts, pedagogy and cultural resistance: New materialisms. Rowman & Littlefield International. Hickey-Moody, A., et al. (2021). Arts-based methods for research with children. Palgrave Macmillan. Koro-Ljungberg, M., MacLure, M., & Ulmer, J. (2018). D...a…t…a…, Data++, Data, and Some Problematics. N. K. Denzin, & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research (5th Edition) (pp. 462–484). Sage. Lyons, A. (2014). Perpetual speech: Hollis Frampton’s Gloria! as Lyric Poem. Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, School of English, Queen’s University. Manning, E. (2016). The minor gesture. Duke University Press. Nordstrom, S. N. (2015). A data assemblage. International Review of Qualitative Research, 8(2), 166–193. Snaza, N., et al. (2014). Toward a Posthumanist education. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 30(2), 17. Taylor, C. A., & Hughes, C. (Eds.). (2016). Posthuman research practices in education. Palgrave Macmillan.

Chapter 8

Drawing as Felt Marissa McClure Sweeny, Robert Sweeny, Stella Sweeny, and Luca Sweeny

8.1 Introduction I have co-produced this visual essay with my three young children during pandemic time. Robert in his fourth and fifth year, Stella as a two and three-year-old, and Luca throughout the arc of a newborn year. Co-production encompasses a variety of methodological approaches including participatory action research, communities of practice, and art as a social practice, among others. As Bell and Pahl (2018) note, one of the key characteristics of co-production is to “understand that useful and critical knowledge is dispersed throughout society … Its methods can empower co-producers to shape the world in which they live” (p. 107). The specific orientation toward coproduction that I take on in my work stems from the intersected experiences of being a mother, an artist, and an art education scholar. Especially important has been the process of considering how being the principal carer of my three children informs such experiences (see also Trafí-Prats, 2019). I have been inspired and engaged by artist Lenka Clayton’s (2012) project Artist Residency in Motherhood (ARIM). ARIM is a call for motherartists across the world to explore the practice of art residency in their own homes, around daily routines of care and shared forms of existence with children. ARIM is an example of coproduction’s focus on alternative forms of knowing with children in experiences of motherhood. Motherhood tends to be formed around the knowledge that is typically excluded from or distorted by the neoliberalized structures and forces of academia, as well as other professional workplaces, where mothers are routinely seen as less committed, less reliable, and less productive. Instead, ARIM reconceptualizes motherhood as a place of explorative and speculative work around mothering conditions and an evolving complex of mother-children relations. As Clayton (2012) notes, M. M. Sweeny (B) · R. Sweeny · S. Sweeny · L. Sweeny Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Trafí-Prats and C. M. Schulte (eds.), New Images of Thought in the Study of Childhood Drawing, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07143-0_8

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ARIM’s aim is to explore the potential creativity that can emerge from the fragmented times, little focus, and exhaustion of living with and taking care of young children. I joined ARIM and began my own artist residency in motherhood with my three children on January 1, 2021. With ARIM’s DIY kit, we wrote a manifesto, and co-created a share studio space (Fig. 8.1) that we named HOP (short for Hopscotch for which we did not have enough letters) using the vinyl studio sign Clayton recommends. In the series of multimodal stories that I present later, through text, photographs, and time-based media, I aim to convey and express the intense space–time of mothering, being invariably around three young children in entanglements of care, work, creation, and general survival, an experience that has intensified as COVID-19 continues to mandate that I live, work, care and create at home. Simultaneously, I will try to illuminate a different approach to the understanding of how children’s drawings come to matter. The ongoing temporality of mothering, something that Baraitser (2009) has described as “a series of unconnected experiences that remain fundamentally unable to cohere” (p. 15) can challenge an understanding of children’s drawing as something that is easy to read, grasp and fit in our existing knowledge of

Fig. 8.1 HOP studio

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childhood. The interruptions, indigestible moments, and odd affects forming mothering experiences are an appropriate space–time to engage and think with what Schulte (2019) describes as the unknowability and otherness of children’s drawings, and how this otherness propels us to consider the role of more-than-human materials and a-signifying forces mattering children’s drawing. In embracing the impossibility of mastery and the constant disruption of knowledge that mothering experiences convey, I am also reflecting on what Thompson (2021), quoting Kinard (2015), describes as an ethics of resistance toward single stories about childhood and adults that do not account for the situatedness of their lives and entanglements with the material world. Thus, I seek to generate alternative narratives of being and working with children; alternative from what Dahlberg et al. (2013) call the Minority world (sic) created by the developmentalist narratives of optimization which dominate spaces for young children in the United States and many other countries. In such a Minority world, children’s drawings would often be treated as less-than-human, because the notion of what is to be human becomes narrowed to ideas of rationality, communication, and legibility. It is in this respect that I seek to valorize children’s drawings and drawing with children as felt. Drawing as felt is a concept that I borrow and adapt from Springgay’s (2019) writing as felt, which I discuss in more detail in the section below. The concept allows me to encounter drawing not as something to be known but as an existential, shared space of affective encounter where human and non-human forces resonate, blend, and compose. Thus, I propose an ontological turn, in which rather than knowing children’s drawings, we sense them and re-sensitize ourselves with them. As Baraitser (2009) notes, a mother may be a subject of many interruptions, who struggles to know because knowledge is associated with a self-contained individual who carries a cohesive linear narrative. However, she argues that in maternal encounters, the mother emerges “not only as a subject of interruption, encumbered, viscous, impeded, but also re-sensitized to sound, smell, emotions, sentient awareness, language, love” (p. 4). Following this, the question that I pose to guide the thinking of this visual essay is: How do children’s drawing re-sensitize and recalibrate our adult bodies to sense more, to sense differently, and to attune ourselves to the creative forces of life participating in children’s drawings?

8.2 Drawing as Felt Contemplating the process of felting wool evokes bodily memories. Wet felting was one of the first fiber processes that I learned as a five-year-old. Tangles of freshly shorn lambswool catch my fingernails as I card; tiny sticks and shards of grass embedded in the fibers scratch my water-wrinkled fingers; sticky, shiny, smooth lanolin waxes my palms; the gamey aroma of warm wet wool infuses my cells.

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The recollections of this process made me think of the inseparable, cascading, and touching drawing entanglements that I experience with my children in our domestic world, and the surrounding streets, parks, and woods that we have visited during the pandemic. I think of them as felting, as different threads joining and moving in different directions nomadically. Many of the drawings that involve my children emerge in the middle of immanent activity that is already happening in these territories, despite our presence, such as extensive blankets of snow, birds chirping in the forest, the solitude of the pandemic, nights without sleep, the loss of a beloved pet. Berlant (2013) describes such an impact of the world on bodies as affect. Affect is always a force external to the body. It is not connected to the individual’s intentions or commanded actions, because affect is sensed and acts on our bodies before we can consciously perceive its effects and direct our actions (Massumi, 2002). Affect delimits the body’s ability to act. It gives or takes power from one’s body, its desires, and aspirations (Hickey-Moody, 2014). The notion of drawing as felt helps me think of bodies in drawing as acts that are affected by worldly encounters. As noted earlier, I connect drawings as felt with Springgay’s (2019) envisaging of writing as felt. Springgay works with the double meaning of felt as a way of thinking transcorporeally (Alaimo, 2016) about how human and non-human matter compose irreversibly, and of felt as a term that expresses how materiality touches us and creates transmaterial events. She describes felt “as force and movement [with] no warp and weft (…) felt spreads out infinitely (…) it cannot be undone and the fibers returned to their original state” (Springgay, 2019, p. 58). Felt relates to “the tactility of becoming” (p. 64), in which hands are sites where thought happens imminently and where handmade things carry repetition with singularity and difference (Vaccaro, 2015). Felt speaks too of the worldliness of touch and how through touch bodies “reach towards the world” (Manning, 2009, p. xvi), propelling us forward to think the body as more than a closed organism, but additionally as sensing and responsive bodies in continuous encounters. In touch, the body “emerges out of frictions, accidents, disagreements, and interlockings that are both firmly institutionalized … and that create emergent space-times” (p. xvii). Building on this rich framework of ideas, Springgay (2019) proposes that writing as felt is “a practice of writing that engenders bodily difference that is affective, moving, and wooly” (p. 57). It works “propositionally and speculatively—it asks researchers to think otherwise about writing, beyond text on a page” (p. 68) and with a focus on “the speculative middles” (p. 66) on the cardings, knots, and helices that emerge in transcorporeal and transmaterial events that spill, trespass, transit, and feature “knowledge and learning [as being] co-composed frictionally and through touching encounters. Education is no longer about right responses or dogma (striated), but becomes multi-sensory, affective, involutionary, felt events” (p. 66). Springgay’s (2019) writing as felt inspires me to think that drawing as felt is also constituted by speculative middles that make it impossible “to know [what a drawing is or does] ahead of the encounter” (p. 67). That drawings cannot be known in advance and can only be approached from within events brings us back to the argument, that I suggested earlier, about the possibility of thinking more in drawings

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as sensuous events in which we not only draw but we are formed as new bodies as a result of the event. For as Dennis Atkinson (2018) writes: We tend to think along the lines that an ‘I’ makes a drawing, ‘I’ employ a pencil, brush, pen, charcoal, and so on, to make marks on a surface. A subject who makes predicates the drawing. Can we put such transcendent thinking aside? Can we think in other ways? Can we take a nudge from Deleuze and Guattari and begin in the middle from the notions that the action and the sense of drawing produces both drawing and drawer (a particular drawing-drawer machine)? (pp. 142–143)

Springgay (2019) and Atkinson’s (2018) suggestion of thinking from the middle resonates with Haraway’s (2016) notion of SF, which stands for speculative fabulation and constitutes a practice of making stories that support earth’s generative futures, These include the children’s game cat’s cradle, which consists of making patterns (or string figures) with yarn wrapped around the fingers of both hands and with the hands half meter of distance to each other to keep the thread tense. The game moves by lending the pattern to another player, who picks the yarn with their fingers and in doing this transforms the pattern into a new one. The game operates with “a creative uncertainty” (p. 34) that involves thinking, making, and responding to one and other in ways that continue making the relation possible, that continue drawing and creating patterns. Haraway’s interpretation of cat’s cradle propels me to think that in practices of drawing we coexist with others and otherness (Schulte, 2019) (snow, birds, nests, loss, absence). We sense and vibrate with their different rhythms and movements and learn to attune and respond to changes and disturbances (see also Tsing, 2015). The drawings in which my children become involved are not limited to one space, nor are they reduced to the parameters of the paper; rather, they are events of and with mud, snow, sand, birds, and territorial lines that continue rippling, evoking, making, and relaying back (Fig. 8.2). Similarly, in their examination of felt using material engagement theory, Akta¸s et al. (2020) describe felting as “the result of a negotiation between the material and the maker, and the bodily movements of a practice emerging from this dialogical act” (p. 39). They propose that “human thinking is situated in deep intra-actions between people and their surroundings, both human and nonhuman, and occurs between people, things, space and time” (p. 39). Complementarily, in her revelations about affective intra-action between bodies and spaces in site-specific dance, Kuppers (2017) explains that “Site-specific dance brings me experientially into a different relation with environmental materiality. It beckons: Let’s merge” (p. 133). In her account of dancing with a beach in Michigan she writes: My feet sink into the ruins of sea creatures and the debris of mountains. Tiny skeletons cushion my fall. They pour through my fingers, reminding me of other-than-human perspectives on what is passed, and what is passing. I am implicated in these sand ruins, and they come skin-close (p. 132).

At the same time, it is important to remark how Barad (2008) reminds us that there is not an outside of matter. There is not a point where matter becomes discourse or representation, all is discursive-material intra-activity. In our practice (Marissa,

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Fig. 8.2 Stella moving a fallen branch through the melting crust of frost on the warbler trail during late winter, 2021

Robert, Stella and Luca), matter not only concerns recognizing and responding to the agency of the materials that we draw with and draw us into drawing in the places we visit, dwell, and transit. It involves too and most prominently, the qualities and existential states that emerge from specific material constraints. In our home during the pandemic such material constraints became compounded: Not having maternity leave or childcare, caring for three young children while having a full-time teaching job, remaining sheltered in place for months. Alaimo (2016), along with TallBear (2015), Spady (2017), and Springgay (2019) note that material entanglements, like our drawing practices, need to account too for messy relationships relating to histories of violence, power, and oppression. Therefore, the entanglement of pandemic and mothering created powerful affects and emotions including a deep sense of loneliness and precarity. To continue elaborating on the ideas of approaching drawing as felt, as a way to sense and re-sensitize, in the sections below I narrate a series of stories around ordinary experiences in shared moments with Robert, Stella, and Luca during the pandemic in which drawing emerged entangled with complex material and affective ecologies. Intentionally, I have avoided to resolve their interrupted, anecdotal and

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odd nature (Baraitser, 2009; Clayton, 2012) and instead have tried to create a text that moves with their fragmented rhythms, evocative resonances, and wild otherness (Schulte, 2019), hoping that this evokes a multi-sensory, affective space to feel and felt with our stories.

8.3 Carding Carding is a mechanical process that disentangles, cleans and intermixes fibres to produce a continuous web or sliver suitable for subsequent processing. This is achieved by passing the fibres between differentially moving surfaces… (“Carding,” 2021, para. 1)

Luca’s homecoming corresponds with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. It is a period in which my children and I spend every day and every night together. We eat, sleep and bathe all together. I ache with loneliness even though I am never alone: The trapped, powerless, and isolating postpartum experience blends hopelessly with the nationwide quarantine. All of our boundaries blur. No one is there to help when I arrive home with Luca. His family cannot come to meet him. My university teaching begins online when he is three weeks old and continues virtually for twenty months. Ripples of postpartum anxiety, depression, grief, joy, and isolation saturate the intimate daily movements that shape our lives. The children and I meander sleepdeficient in and around our home and the trails that surround it. We resolve to go out and to walk each day, no matter the weather. We amass layers, we return soggy and chilled. They have been with me throughout the writing of this essay in the HOP studio as it pulses engorged by collections from our daily encounters. Carding. These are some of the disentangled fibers that are intermixed in our stories: I write while we work together in the studio and outside. In our daily common existence we think-make-do. We talk, the children talk. In this visual essay, their words appear formatted in italics. They carry a wondrous exuberance that I resist to polish in correct grammatical sentences. As Maclure (2016) has noted, language practices where adults edit children’s utterances seek to control the excessive, bodily and worldly aspects that language carries. The worldliness of language, like the wild in drawings (Schulte, 2019), is hard to pin down and cannot be reduced to signs. I see certain parallelisms between my desire of listening, attuning, respecting their words and how, in one of our walks, the children listened, attuned, and recorded birds’ voices using the voice memo function on my iPhone (Fig. 8.3; see also QR code at the end of this essay).

8.4 Nesting What is our house number? Do you think my friends forgot our house number? Maybe that’s why they haven’t come to play?

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Fig. 8.3 A hooded warbler alights with Stella on the warbler trail in early winter, 2020

No. It’s because of the coronabirus. When will it leave our world?

Around Luca’s sixth month, Pinterest iPhone notifications recommend that I create pandemic diaries as mementos for my children’s assumed future return to normalcy. A mother-friend confides that she has been staging photos of her children without their masks to prophylactically erase their memories. My body physically recognizes her craving to contain this uncharted place with the polish of curation. I yearn to consider it a possibility until the fat sketchbook that we all draw together in every night before bed, each surface of it crammed with Stella’s resplendent drawn lines, is lacerated by her breath-taking rage. While my own welling sobs choke me, I attempt to recreate the sketchbook page-by-page, until it too is absorbed by the inertia of piles (Fig. 8.4). I needed someone to come and to save me from the ghostes who were eated me!

Robert, Stella, and Luca rarely draw on the paper immediately available to them in copious forms in our shared studio. Their early drawings are made on/by mud, sand, snow, leaves, soap bubbles, light, pixels, and frosting. Their drawings feel and felt in the sense that they are sensuous and responsive to worldly encounters,

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Fig. 8.4 “This is a lot of monsters,” drawn by Stella in her sketchbook

what Kuppers (2017) describes as “material alchemies” (p. 135). I have experienced many reverberations of these drawing events at home and at the places we go. Every time, I think on how these drawings escape the frames with which art educators have come to know children’s drawings. In education, children’s drawings have been commonly described as intentional semiotic practices commanded by the child that reveal the interiority of the child as cognition, acculturation, emotions, and skills. This lasting conviction generates and sustains the single story of childhood to which Thompson (2021) refers and suggests redrawing. Perhaps, the difficulty to recognize the drawings that we do as drawings is because they cannot be cut away from the world and analyzed apart from it. I see our drawings resonating with Haraway’s (2016) discussion around sensible materialisms which she defines as “ordinary practices of getting involved in each other’s lives” (p. 76). This is, getting involved with mud, sand, snow, leaves, soap bubbles, light, pixels, and frosting as a way of “becoming-with to cultivate the capacity to respond... by open-ended, exploratory processes” (p. 76). Becoming within the damaged world materialized by the pandemic and its compounded asymmetries could be a way “to stay with the trouble in order to nurture well-being in a damaged planet” (p. 76). Staying with the trouble here means sitting with discomfort; an active resistance of the drive to contain and to control. This resistance cradles the capacity to generate unexpected joys. In the ontological turn of sensing rather than knowing children’s drawings, I recognize the slow space–time of mothering as one that allows the valorization of these drawings not for what they are, or for what they mean but for how they entangle

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and build connections with the world. What is especially important is that Robert, Stella, and Luca draw with a genuine curiosity for the others who they are responding to—that is, the mud, sand, snow, leaves, soap bubbles, light, pixels, and frosting. They “[hold] open the possibility that surprises are in the store, that something interesting is about to happen, but only if one cultivates the virtue of letting those one visits intraactively shape what occurs” (Haraway, 2016, p. 127). Experiencing the openness of wild encounters in drawing, makes me hold loosely the ontologies and epistemologies that we project into children’s learning. I strive to attune and feel the singularities and becomings in each drawing event and the unknown adventures they can open up.

8.5 Robert’s Nest Robert built his first nest when he was two. Outfitted with a battery-operated lantern in the shape of a shark, a matching head lamp, and his father’s iPhone, he intuitively hoisted cut branches twice his size into a pyramid shelter (Fig. 8.5). He frequently refashions his same nest with the tools that he finds: Lately it is a hatchet meant for chopping firewood. Robert’s nest lines the edge of the deep wood that retreats behind our home which sits atop the very last street before our small town expands into the rural countryside. A family of a dozen or so deer live in this wood. The deer arrived on our first day here to greet us, having already claimed the back patio, side yard, and most of the abundant vegetation that engulfed the weathered years-empty old home in which we now live. My children are carefully attuned to the deer and to their life cycles. They have watched and have photographed the doe giving birth and the fawns’ first steps, an older buck’s leg injury and death in our garden bed, and the family’s daily meals at dawn and dusk. When he finished building that first nest that continues to evolve into different forms on the same site, Robert declared, “My nest!” Sometimes he would photograph the deer tracks that emanated from their use of his nest as he used his finger or a stick to redraw the traces of their hooves and their droppings in the mud. Nearly three years after he made those initial photographs, he continues to return to iCloud and pinches and pulls the screen with his finger to enlarge them, re-inscribing them with undulating pixels. He narrates as he traces the screen with his fingertips: R-O-B-E-R-T I’m drawing a text. Here is baby Robert. That’s me. It’s actually me. I used to be a baby. I remember when I was a baby because I see myself as a baby. Here! That’s me!

Despite his attempts to entice them, no birds come to live in Robert’s nest. He projects his defeat onto the “scarecrows” that circle overhead in favor of higher perches and he proposes that we find some new birds better suited to the nest that he has so affectionately tended.

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Fig. 8.5 Robert’s nest (clockwise from right); the first nest that Robert created at the edge of the back wood; Robert’s photograph of a fawn standing up shortly after its birth; Robert reviewing the images that he creates of deer tracks through his nest; an example of Robert’s photographs of deer tracks inside of his nest

8.6 Birding Birding is the opposite of being at the movies—you’re outside, not sitting in a windowless box; you’re stalking wild animals, not looking at pictures of them. You’re dependent on weather, geography, time of day—if you miss the prothonotary warbler, there isn’t a midnight showing. (Rosen, 2011, para. 1)

Birding echoes Haraway’s (2016) practice of visiting, one that requires effort, involvement and finding others interesting as we politely occupy their homes no matter how different they are from ours. We began seriously birding together in the spring of the quarantine. The trail was as open as it was isolated. I can easily

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navigate it wearing Luca as Robert and Stella run ahead and squabble about who is “leading the trail.” They take turns making sure the land beneath them is “stabled,” contemplating the affordances of alternative pathways. Their bodies draw and absorb these lines, demonstrating how drawing is not only a visual and contained event but one that grows out from previous haptic experiences of touch and movement (Ingold, 2013). Leaves abundant with mist sweat on our heads. Robert and Stella are boisterous in their diaphanous rain pants. Luca whimpers as a cool fog reddens his cheeks. The trail head reads, “Nest is open cup of dead leaves, bark, fine grasses, spider- webs, hair, and plant down.” We hear a hooded warbler first: “It has a black drawing on its head. That’s the hood, the black drawing. It’s my favorite bird!” We return all throughout the spring, summer, autumn, and winter as we circumnavigate Luca’s birth year. Four months into our pandemic birding practice, a warbler alights from the understory and perches on the ledge of Stella’s hand. Using the iPhone as an extension of his slender arm, Robert captures this exact moment with the audible snap of a counterfeit shutter. In November 2020, the trees have their last leaves as they reveal the warblers’ intertwining flight paths. Robert and Stella handily trace them with a stick in the air and with an iPhone’s slow motion video feature (Fig. 8.6). The warblers migrate: An impossible journey of thousands of miles. We will be there to greet their return as our pandemic isolation gloves us in familiarity and weariness.

Fig. 8.6 Robert and Stella document our time with the warbler trail, through the span of each season and through their tracking of the warblers’ movements. We walk daily despite the fluctuations in weather and participation through the crest of the pandemic year and beyond

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8.7 Fulling “Fulling” is the process of producing felt fabric from animal fiber yarn that has already been woven or knitted. Fulling takes the woven or knitted fabric through the process of hot water and agitation in order to facilitate shrinkage and create felted fabric. In the Middle Ages, “fullers” were textile workers who used Fuller’s Earth, a highly adsorptive clay that removed grease and oils from the woven cloth. (Cranley, 2007, n.p.)

We punctuate birding trips with cold-weather beach excursions at the convergence of two trails. They draw lines through the sand with their arms, feet, and sticks, hone their building techniques with buckets, and make “dangerous” compositions with rocks, shells, and eggs (Fig. 8.7). During an early spring turn, the cool sand refreshed an ongoing landscape of “secret treasures and messages.” Robert found the first message on a discarded tag left on the beach. He began to “draw my own message back” in the sand as he called

Fig. 8.7 A “dangerous” composition with the beach at the lake near our home that we visit often on our daily walks

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Fig. 8.8 Robert’s beach body drawing

it aloud, “leaving tracks.” He “left” and “found” conversational tracks as he drew with generous sweeps of his arms and legs, and then in an improvised plank he drew very long tracks along the shore with the whole of his form. Look at me! I’m making drawings with my body!

Like fullers who transform animal fiber into felt, Robert used the highly pliable sand to become a body (Fig. 8.8). Manning (2009) writes that “to become a body is to alter conceptions of what a body “is”” (p. xix). Developmental theories of children’s drawings always refer to the same universal body in which infant gestural movements conform the first marks in the shape of vertical and horizontal lines. Later zigzags, spirals and circles, and other graphic structures appear. Such graphic changes are interpreted in a linear manner in which the role of the body in drawing is to gain more and more control. Differently from this, becoming a body suggests metamorphosis, improvisation, and opening to the movements of other bodies. “Look at me! I’m making drawings with my body!” constitutes a moment in which Robert differentiates himself through touch and embodiment as he creates movements and marks with and on the sand‚ but also by realizing the potential that the whole body is a machine for drawing. Circling back again to Atkinson (2018)‚ “the action and the sense of drawing produces both drawing and drawer” (p. 143).

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8.8 The Nest Near the winter solstice, Robert becomes anxious, unreachable by words. His typically lively small body transforms stiff and unyielding as I plead, “Can you hear me?” My voice fails as it chimes back through my own ears. That very Sunday we lost our dog, Ollie. Even though we have watched him grow frail and blind, unable to complete the birding trail with us, the loss hits as a sudden avalanche. The children all unexpectedly witness Ollie’s death as he wails inconsolably while my spouse and I frantically attempt to comfort him with a tepid bath and warmed bone broth. We lay down all together with him in our bedroom, everyone is wide awake. Ollie’s mournful screams pierce each of our bodies with a permeance that continues months after he grew quiet and still just before dawn. Amidst the breathless cold of mid-January, we have no place to store his body except in our unheated studio. We crumble. Robert and Stella ask to see Ollie almost as frequently as they verbally retell the detailed story of his death. Stella draws his body every night before bed (Fig. 8.9) as she repeats her mantra, a variation of this story: Here, I am drawing Ollie’s body under the blanket. Ollie is dead. His dog body is under the blanket in the studio. When he wakes up from being dead, he will make better decisions and I really hope that he wakes up.

Robert etches his own body life size on a giant piece of rolled kraft paper. The drawing fills his entire bedroom wall: Unutterable worries, a fierce tangle of red marker lines in his head, a black pit in his tummy, all drawn with a grip so tightly fisted his sanguine fingers begin to throb. His therapist suggests a secure place where the rhythms of squeezing dough can infiltrate his worry: He suggests his nest.

Fig. 8.9 One of Stella’s many drawings of Ollie’s body under the blanket in the studio

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8.9 Roving 1a: not restricted as to location or area of concern b: capable of being shifted from place to place: MOBILE 2: inclined to ramble or stray a roving fancy Roving Noun 2: a slightly twisted roll or strand of usually textile fibers (Merriam-Webster, n.d.)

All the while, Stella’s drawings spill out of full pages and fill every available surface in our home with a staccato rhythm of hatched lines that emanate in each direction from her diminutive frame. They cover Bristol board, a hundred bound books, walls, doors, an etching, the bathtub, and floor. Always the same scratching lines and faces. A dragon looms from a painted cloister of black overlapping tangles. A lot of monsters. A warning appears taped in our entry wall: “You don’t like to be punched!”. We start re-building an indoor version of Robert’s nest the next day, sewing it from five pillows and a bedsheet. We illuminate it with battery-operated fairy lights on a thin wire that can bend into many shapes. They notice nests everywhere. We go and fabricate them from anything they can find. How many animals have a nest! And bugs. And eggs!

8.10 The Snow Nest After Ollie’s death, the snow comes in relentless bounty. We exchange our muddied rain pants for snow bibs and stifling waterproof mittens. Stella asks, “How will we draw the nest with the snow? My hands can’t even work!”. Their first attempt to construct a snow nest flounders (Fig. 8.10). The circumference of its foundation is exhaustingly enormous. They close in on its boundaries. Bricks collapse. They switch to buckets in unison, unverbalized. Lanky round bricks plop out onto the circle, cementing a first layer as they melt together. Their uneven tops “need to be sliced,” leaving traces of the “slicer” in the bricks’ frosty crowns. Look! We sliced a line in these tops! Muffed elbows carve out an entrance equal to a full sweep of a three-year-old arm. A frenzy crests. Two hours in twenty-one-degree weather have passed unnoticed. It’s time for the second layer! Delicate as a surgery, the tedious process of packing and stacking begins. They close the second circle, and take a moment to dance it all in before shuddering the impact of the cold and rushing to the fire for solace. A full day of cavalier sunshine initiates the process of entropy. They compel one another to sit with the nest overnight. “We’ll make a picture! Then we will have it forever, and you won’t have to be sad about it, mama!”.

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Fig. 8.10 The snow nest (clockwise from top left); building the second layer; documenting the snow nest through time; building the third layer just before it crumbles; the first snow nest with its too large circumference; Robert’s documentation of the snow nest several days later

It persists as days slide into weeks and the melted snow transforms into a glacial crust. A lavish fresh snowfall. They excavate the nest’s first foundation and wipe it clean, redrawing its girth. Moving together, Stella sweeps out the entrance. Robert goes inside to check it for size, as they commence packing the buckets. Luca starts to pack this time: His orange mittens alternating between packing and tasting. Their choreography materializes: The first layer becomes double, a back-to-back row of baby shark teeth. A pyramid emerges: The second story rises as if predetermined, “STABLED!” They shriek together as its final declaration. There is no celebratory dance: A wild-eyed dinosaur bacchanal breaches the entrance and pummels each meticulously sliced brick with resonant ecstasy until the nest’s whole architecture is razed to its Antarctic foundation.

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8.11 Nested: Attuning to Feeling Drawing as an Entanglement Nests continue to come to us throughout my collating of this essay. One arrives in a mailed box of treasures from a friend who has seen our stories through social media. Her attentiveness accentuates our already-accelerated craving for connection. Stella draws on its translucent outside with an orange paint stick while singing, “Friends, this is something that you can do if you are worried. Here you can do this if you are worried.” Another nest emerges from wrapping material as it embraces an “In love animal” who can “shine its light from inside” with a miniature battery light. Their grandfather finds a nest that has fallen from a tree and mails it to Robert. It flagrantly perches over their studio table, damp and moldy. Nests are at every turn during our daily wanderings; in the crook of every bent tree, in the shape of cereal treats, and carved by enormous branches into the ground. Luca, who has been watching, picks up one of the drawing sticks and makes a few scratches in the ground (Fig. 8.11). As he navigates the park, wobbly legged through mud, he experiments with different ways to hold the stick; sometimes closer to the end that was toward his body and other times closer to the end near the ground which gave him more control. He rubs the end of the drawing stick in all of the surfaces of the ground: wood chips, mud, leaves, and a semi-paved pathway. There,

Fig. 8.11 Luca’s moving of the stick, early winter 2021

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he finds his own stick, broader in circumference but shorter. He uses both sticks at once ambidextrously as he charts forms through pliant earth. Some months after I finished writing the first draft of this visual essay, we return to our warblers. The spring after presents its fullest vision of the impending turn of seasons: A sunlit panorama dappled and spotty replete with an orchestra of warbler calls. Robert adds his own cadence to the mix, whistling easily as the birds dart off his now-relaxed palms to the understory and back. Luca, now a one-year-old toddler, scurries alongside him as he unfolds both hands and draws them through space into an arc in the sky. He squeaks as a hooded warbler alights on the tip of his finger and felts itself into us (Fig. 8.12). The stories I narrated speak of an experience of being nested literally and speculatively. Literally because we had to remake our notion of living in our home in the new situation brought by the pandemic which involved uncertainty and isolation in a moment, Luca’s birth, when we needed the support of our friends and family. Speculatively, because the full days of intense and uninterrupted co-habitation have been populated by nesting and nested stories and events. These are stories that continue going, making, and worlding. Paraphrasing science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin, Haraway (2016) argues about the response-ability of keeping stories going, “good stories do not know how to finish” (p. 125). Like felt the stories of our nests spread, entangle, and are nomadic. Good stories that keep going “reach into rich pasts to sustain thick presents to keep the story going for those that come after” (p. 125). Luca is reaching into Robert’s rich past of gesturing toward the birds, he comes after to keep the story going.

Fig. 8.12 We continue to walk the warbler trail with Luca, now a one-year-old toddler, who has circumnavigated the year with us all

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Echoing Haraway (2016), in this visual essay, I have tried to convey that it matters what stories we tell to tell stories about children’s drawings. I have tried to tell stories in which drawings belong to situated and affective experiences of homemaking, inhabitation, movement, and affect, where drawing evokes the times, matters, gestures, and lines that make these environments and how these are absorbed in bodied gestures and emotions. These nest and nested stories are made of multiple odd moments and interruptions. However, they are filled too with sensuous potential to encounter the world in ways that re-sensitized my body. All along I have practiced an “ethical resistance” (Thompson, 2021), actively refusing to separate drawing from other matters and stories from which drawing events emerge. I have rejected the assumption that what happens in the event of children’s drawing is knowable. Instead, I have tried to recognize and think with the otherness of the encounter (Schulte, 2019). Finally, I have foregrounded the situatedness and value of our (Marissa, Robert, Stella and Luca’s) co-produced knowledge. A minor knowledge built in ordinary experiences of motherhood and its precarity. In such contexts of openness and uncertainty, we have cultivated “ways of being emergent” (Tsing, 2015, p. 23) with multiple others. Some of these gatherings with others and otherness have generated harmony but also dissonance. Our drawings absorbed, vibrated, and resonated with many of such affects. As Tsing (2015) notes, survival requires that we learn to live polyphonically with multiple rhythms and trajectories of growth, like felt, beyond a single story.

References Akta¸s, B., Makel ¨ a, ¨ M., and Laamanen, T. (2020). Material connections in craft-making: The case of felting. Retrieved February 17, 2021, from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344188563 Alaimo, S. (2016). Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times. University of Minnesota Press. Atkinson, D. (2018). Art, disobedience, and ethics: The adventure of pedagogy. Palgrave Macmillan. Barad, K. (2008). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. In S. Alaimo & S. Heickman (Eds.), Material feminisms (pp. 120–154). Indiana University Press. Baraitser, L. (2009). Maternal encounters: The ethics of interruption. Routledge. Bell, D. M., & Pahl, K. (2018). Co-production: Towards a utopian approach. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 21(1), 105–117. https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2017.134 8581

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Berlant, L. (2013). Cruel optimism. Duke University Press. Carding. (2021, June 6). In Wikipedia. Retrieved February 17, 2021, from https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Carding Clayton, L. (2012). Artist Residence in Motherhood Manifesto. ARIM. Retrieved February 17, 2021, from https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56e03c0b044262cdb87af698/t/57200f699f7266fe45 12c551/1461718908827/arim_manifesto.pdf Cranley, M. (2007, April). Felting, fulling, or boiled wool. Fiber to Fashion. Retrieved February 17, 2021, from https://www.fibre2fashion.com/industry-article/1792/felting-fulling-or-boiled-wool Dahlberg, G., Moss, P., & Pence, A. (2013). Beyond quality in early childhood education and care: Languages of evaluation (3rd ed.) Routledge. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. Hickey-Moody, A. (2014). Affect as method: Feelings, aesthetics and affective pedagogy. In R. Coleman & J. Ringrose (Eds.), Deleuze and research methodologies (pp. 79–95). University of Edinburgh Press. Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Routledge. Kinard, T. A. (2015). Anonymous green painting: An artifact of resistance as danger and hope in an early childhood setting. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 28(2), 195–215. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2013.859325 Kuppers, P. (2017). Dancing material history: Site-specific performance in Michigan. Tdr/the Drama Review, 63(3), 235. MacLure, M. (2016). The refrain of the a-grammatical child: Finding another language in/for qualitative research‚ 16(2), 173–182. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708616639333 Manning, E. (2009). Politics of touch: Sense, movement, sovereignity. University of Minnesota Press. Massumi. B. (2002). Parables of the virtual: Movement, affect and sensation. Duke University Press. Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Roving. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. Retrieved February 17, 2021, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/roving Rosen, J. (2011, October 17). The difference between bird watching and birding. The New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-difference-between-bird-watchingand-birding Schulte, C. (2019). Wild encounters: A more-than-human approach to children’s drawing. Studies in Art Education, 60(2), 92–102. Spady, S. (2017) Reflections on Late Identity: In Conversation with Melanie J. Newton, Nirmala Erevelles, Kim TallBear, Rinaldo Walcott, and Dean Itsuji Saranillio. Journal of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, 3(1), 90–115. Springgay, S. (2019). ‘How to write as felt’ Touching transmaterialities and more-than-human intimacies. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 38, 57–69. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217018-9624-5 TallBear, K. (2015). An indigenous reflection on working beyond the human/not human. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21(2–3), 230–235. Thompson, C. (2021). Beyond the single story of childhood: Recognizing childism in art education practice. In H. Park & C. Schulte (Eds.), Visual arts with young children: Practices, pedagogies and learning (pp. 159–168). Routledge. Trafí-Prats, L. (2019). Thinking childhood art with care in an ecology of practices. In M. Sakr & J. Osgood (Eds.), Postdevelopmental approaches to childhood art (pp. 191–209). Bloomsbury. Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press. Vaccaro, J. (2015). Feelings and fractals: Woolly ecologies of transgender matter. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21(2–3), 273–293.

Chapter 9

City as Soundscape: Sounding-Drawings and Drawing-Sounds as (Re)creations of Urban Space Dan Wheatley and Catherine Clements

9.1 Introduction This visual essay reflects on a two-year project titled Going Places Growing Places (TASC, 2013) devised and facilitated by artists Dan Wheatley and Catherine Clements from The Architecture School of Children in collaboration with children aged 3–4, staff, and parents from a nursery situated in Central Manchester, United Kingdom. Going Places Growing Places encompassed a variety of artistic processes and partnerships with other artists, spaces, and institutions in the city in order to facilitate a sensory exploration through art-based participatory practice. As artists and educators, we guide our practice by the assumption that experiences in the built environment are central to constructing and expanding children’s learning. Below we provide a QR code that links to the project website, where there is a short video providing an overview of the project’s many activities. D. Wheatley (B) · C. Clements The Architecture School of Children, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] C. Clements e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Trafí-Prats and C. M. Schulte (eds.), New Images of Thought in the Study of Childhood Drawing, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07143-0_9

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QR Code: Scan to view the short film:‘Going Places Growing Places’ The focus of the discussion for this visual essay is a series of activities centered on exploring the city as a soundscape, one that involved relations between sound-based explorations of space and active listening to environmental sound recordings and associated drawing activities. Taking on one of the questions facilitated by TrafíPrats and Schulte’s, “Why drawing matters and materializes the lives of children and adults who work, draw and live with them?”, we have looked retrospectively into such activities to consider how sound and its impact in the body (Gershom, 2013) helps us to think of children’s drawings as materiality. The study of drawing in childhood has historically focused on the visual-representational aspects as the crucial traits in defining children’s progression from one developmental milestone to the next (e.g. closing circles, drawing tadpoles, grounding figures, rendering different understandings of point of view, scale, and proportion, etc.) (Sakr & Osgood, 2019). We think that considering sound in relation to mark-making decentres the focus on visuality by affirming a broader sensorial approach that considers the visual to be entangled with the material, and manifested as bodied, aural and environmental. Place, space and sound scholars suggest that sonic selves are socially and environmentally constructed because sounds are effects of vibrations in the world that are felt in the body (Gershom, 2011, 2013; Ingold, 2000). Thus, children’s articulations of sound are shaped by relations of body materialities and other relations to the wider environment (Gallagher et al., 2018). We suggest that because sound cannot be pinned to one specific meaning, sound is inclusive (Gershom, 2011) of multiple stories, imaginative wonderings, associations, and evocations (Gallagher et al., 2018). As such, sound has the potential to open and expand current thinking around young children’s mark-making, especially 3–4-year-olds, an age group whose practices are often centered by a focus on the visual appearance of the markings themselves and the idea that these representations are precursors for early writing (DfE, 2021). Differently from what we are proposing, such an approach registers mark-making as a singular composition of words, eluding the modern history of abstract art, and the more recent history of performative drawing, which have profusely shown how marks have different registers, including automatic, spontaneous, evoked and representational among others (Marranca, 2019). Thus, marks are traces left by a body (or bodies), which are also entangled with space, materials and movement. This differs from dominant theories influencing early years practice in the U.K. which conceptualize these markings as

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sensorio-motor, pre-representational products of an individual (Athey, 1990). This shift from an individualist to an environmental approach to mark-making puts the emphasis on the relational and haptic qualities of marks as non-verbal ways of articulating a vocabulary of relation with the world over their immediate and expected legibility (Marranca, 2019). At the same time, this shows that mark-making has important alliances with sound-making. They are both modalities entangled with material, environmental, and bodied registers, which demonstrate that perception is multi-sensory. Because sound and drawing share materialities of expression, including movement, vibration, resonance and touch, transductions may occur between the two (Ingold, 2013). A transduction is when a register of one mode enters another mode. For example, when the resonance of a sound animates the kinetic quality of a gesture, a line, or stroke. Thus, in relation to the question, “Why drawing matters and materializes the lives of children and adults who work, draw and live with them?”, we argue that it is possible to reach a broader awareness of the materialities involved in mark-making through an engagement with sound and the sonic textures of the city (Acosta & Duval, 2018). Relating sound to mark-making may help artists and educators to perceive markmaking in broader and more inclusive ways, and beyond the pre-representational scheme connected to emergent representation, which includes children’s writing and communication of coherent messages.

9.2 Sound, Architecture and Spatial Exploration Our work in TASC has been highly influenced by Reggio Emilia pedagogies. More especially, we have been interested in the role of the artist envisioned by Reggio as someone who facilitates learning situations where aesthetics and the role of the sensorium are at the center of learning at school and in the community. As Vecchi (2010) argues, while undervalued as something obscure for many educators, aesthetics augments the quality of learning because it is through spending time observing something and drawing it, or mixing colors to obtain a specific hue or intentionally listening to a piece of music or a recorded sound that children are given time and space to form deeply felt connections with the world. It is through these deeply felt connections that more nuanced and complex ways of seeing, relating to, feeling and thinking can be generated. Vecchi (2010) notes that this is important for learning because complex forms of knowing feature complex connections with the world. We are also deeply influenced by how Reggio has emphasized the importance of putting dialogs between pedagogy and architecture at the center of education, including collaborations with architects and designers to see the built environment from the perspective of children’s movements, modes of inhabitancy, and material interactions (Ceppi & Zini, 1998), and to intervene creatively so to make environments expressive of languages significant to young children and their families (Vecchi, 2010).

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Since its beginnings after the Second World War, Reggio developed as a network of municipal schools highly connected to the community and city life. Through their history, Reggio’s pedagogy has perceived the city not as an inert background, but as a lively extension of the school into the community and vice versa. A reflection of this is evident in how Malaguzzi wrote of the city as a creative laboratory of cultural, social, and artistic practices in which educators, children, and families have opportunities to not only access cultural events but also to participate in the creation and activation of spaces, materials, and ideas (Cagliari et al., 2016). In turn, the city as a public space is important to Reggio for making children’s creative knowledge visible to a larger community, a way not only to educate children but to educate the community too in appreciating and caring for children’s points of view and contributions (Vecchi, 2010). These all have been important ideas for us, in the sense that our work with schools and communities have centered on promoting rich sensory experiences in the city as a way to understand and intervene creatively in the spaces that children use and inhabit. To us, sound is one of the sensorial modes through which to foster spatial understanding. In the seminal piece Experiencing Architecture, Rasmussen (1962) writes, “Most people would probably say that architecture does not provide sound. It cannot be heard. But neither does it radiate light yet it can be seen. We see the light it reflects and thereby gain an impression of form and material. In the same way we hear the sounds it reflects and they give us an impression of form and material” (p. 224). Walking into an empty room without furniture, sitting in an opera house listening to music, walking through an underpass, closing our eyes while we walk through the street are all experiences in which we are making sense of space and its materiality through sound resonating in our bodies (Fig. 9.1).

QR Code: Scan to access a copy of the project’s book Similarly, Ellsworth (2004), who writes in this case in the field of education, points that experiences with architecture are essential to learning about the sensuous capacities of our bodies, as expressed through forms of movement, inhabitation, and occupation. Thus, sounding in relation to architecture and the materiality of space offers a powerful shaping force that enables us to think differently about how we affect

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Fig. 9.1 Children exploring their classroom outdoor space by creating sounds with built elements

and are affected by place. For us, as artists and educators collaborating with children, working sensorially and experimentally with spaces and architecture helps us to orientate learning toward process rather than finished products or pre-decided outcomes. This is so, because we understand spaces not as finished products or as containers, but rather as facilitators and sites for the creation of flows and connections (Grosz & Eismann, 2001) between modalities of expression—like sound and mark-making—that open new possibilities of being, becoming and knowing in and with the world. Because space is fluid and carried through the movement of bodies, in different moments of our project we witnessed how drawing grew from a hybrid and fluid space in-between spatial exploration, sound, active listening, and other material processes of making. Sometimes drawing spontaneously occurred as linked to vibrational experiences with sounds. Other times we invited children to draw the sounds that they had experienced in the environment as a way to continue exploring their understanding and engagement with space. For this, we used different materials and drawing provocations, some of which we discuss in the passages, and in relation to the images and recordings that follow. Revisiting this process has made us reflect on what constitutes a drawing, and on the complicated matter of drawing becoming sound and sound becoming drawing.

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9.3 Sound Drawings in Space A boy is outside the classroom exploring the space. He runs a stick over the surface of the metal fence which resonates repeatedly and rhythmically as the stick moves through a line of vertical banisters in a loud frequency with metallic tones. The boy seems drawn to the sound and its feeling and repeats the action. He soon begins to play and modulate the sound and the rhythm more intentionally. Was this running the stick through the fence a form of mark-making, one that resonated with a higher frequency? A drawing in space and time? Or was it just the discovery and performance of some sounds? We captured this moment through the sound-recorder that we carried along when doing work with the children. In a subsequent activity, we decided to share the sound with other children in the group. This sharing is significant because a little anecdote of composing sound with the fence could be easily overlooked in education. In education, listening is usually connected to very specific activities mostly involving linguistic communication, where language is understood to reflect or shape specific actions and behaviors (Gallagher et al., 2018). Thus, making sound with the fence could be disregarded as a mere noise, something that normatively speaking does not communicate a legible meaning. However, creating experiences of active listening to the sounds of a particular space and the bodies in this space, is essential in fostering an understanding of how a place feels in its social, cultural, personal, and material registers (Blesser & Salter, 2009). Following the active listening of the sound created by the boy, we invited children to draw in a diversity of surfaces, paper, the ground, and walls of the building, using large spaces and their entire bodies to activate, engage with, and tease out different sounds (see Fig. 9.2). This shows that sound impacts and transforms the self by making the body feel in relation to vibrations and changes in the environment. As Gallagher et al. (2018) note, sounds are grounded in place, but they are also pliable. They can detach from their emplaced origin and become something else, moving as an affective force that matters bodies beyond its opening audition. Mark-making can also be this becoming something else of sound, a materializing of gestures, movements, and rhythms derived from the evocation, imagination, and/or associations generated by active listening.

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Fig. 9.2 Boy mark-making on the floor after experimenting with sound and the built environment

QR code: Scan to play the sound file with the title “Sound Drawings in Space”

9.4 Concertina of Sounds The concertina of sounds came about after introducing this musical instrument to children. We thought that the concertina’s flexible properties and playful action would be a trigger for the children to experiment with sounds on many different levels. After introducing this musical instrument to the children via audio and visual material, we wanted the children to experience an actual concertina form and the familiarity of expanding and contracting motions required to play it. This led us to explore with the children similarities in the way we use our bodies to inhale and exhale. Children delighted in noticing these connections, recognizing and contemplating the movement of their rib cages while breathing. Seeing and listening to the concertina had a deep impact on children.

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We became interested in expanding the sonic sensibility (Gallagher et al., 2018) of the concertina and we invited the children to participate in processes of folding paper in concertina booklets, drawing sounds they had felt and recorded in different places of the city that we had visited and explored. We observed moments of deep engagement and pleasure performing the bodily actions of playing a concertina with their collection of sounds. Playing back and listening to their recorded sounds slowed the process of drawing and gave children time for reflection, enabling them to reconnect the sounds to the places and their experiences therein. Children reflected again on where the sounds were located and the built surfaces where the sounds came from. Sound in this activity served as an index of sorts, evoking the meaning of the visited places and experiences. But it also enacted a visceral reaction in the body (Gallagher et al., 2018). Bodies in action drew through complex performances using gesture, voice, and rhythmic utterances as evocations and associations of the listened/felt sounds. For example, the Fig. 9.3 QR code leads to a recording where we can listen to the voice of a girl playfully uttering sounds and interpreting her own concertina drawings. While she clearly uses phonemes and syllabic formations resonant to those children in this class learned and repeated in their phonics lessons, the language invented does not carry a recognizable message. It sounds like “tick, t-ick a lack, laaaaaang, tick, tick, t-ick a lack a laaaaang tick, t-ick a lack a laaaang tick”. By listening and observing the sounds we noticed a deliberate organization of rhythm and of pauses that related back to the drawings. The sound composition created by the girl generated a notational score that contained what we understood to be mathematical concepts such as patterning, sequencing, spatial thinking, and measuring. In the U.K., this level of engagement with such mathematical concepts does not take place until later in children’s primary educational experience. This shows how drawing and art-making are important practices to develop knowledge and the generation of connections “that help us think how things dance together with one another” (Vecchi, 2010, p. 15). As artists, we were fascinated with potential connections between the girl’s drawings and the Fibonacci sequence and Haiku-like poetry.

QR code: Scan to play the sound file with the title “Concertina of Sounds”

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Fig. 9.3 Concertina of Sounds. Children’s gestural drawing

When observing the concertinas and scores created by the children, it was interesting to notice similarities with some of the scores created by Ludwig Van Beethoven. Beethoven pushed the boundaries of notational form, not adhering to the existing forms of sheet music. He developed his own expressive mark-making and drawing associated with the sound and the affective potential of his musical compositions. The musical sheets are an evocative image of the transductive field existing between writing and playing music and listening to sounds and drawing. The gestural mode of drawing a score shares a material register (or affect) generated by the resonance of sound in the body. This transductive affect is also what is generating the connections between the different modes and movements in the concertina drawings (Fig. 9.4).

9.5 Playing the Bridge Our work of facilitating creative practices related to perceiving the environment has taught us that for children to deeply experience urban spaces and buildings there is the need for a creative intervention. With this term we refer to the use of sensory and concrete elements that help children in actively feeling and experiencing spaces through their bodies and imaginations. This could consist of an object, for example, using cameras or sound recorders, but it could also involve devising an event that provokes relation and experimentation with elements of the environment. One of these creative interventions was developed on a foot bridge that connects the South of the city with the city center and overpasses the highway that divides territorially and economically parts of the city. We utilized the gigantic architectural structure, a background element that many children traversed in their daily journeys from home to the nursery, as a musical instrument. The bridge became an object of

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Fig. 9.4 Parallelisms between Ludwig van Beethoven’s music sheets and children’s concertina drawings

wonder, used to generate sounds and rhythms collectively. Children created sounds individually that they then played together. Moving across the extension of the bridge and using its different parts as resonating surfaces helped the children to sensorially register its structural qualities (Fig. 9.5).

QR Code: Scan to play the sound files with the titles “Playing the Bridge 1” and “Playing the bridge 2”

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Fig. 9.5 Playing the Bridge, using the bridge as a musical instrument the children explored the spatial, structural, and sensory qualities

Back in the classroom, we invited the children to further explore the space and design of the bridge through marks, drawings and 3D modeling. These subsequent drawings of the bridge included the representation of several important structural elements of the bridge, reflecting children’s concern around shape and scale. For example several of the drawings featured long lines in narrow long papers, possibly echoing the bridge as a long line the children had walked and played music with. Also, when working on the 3D models children discussed how to reflect the right bend or curvature of the bridge. This illustrates how sound helps in the creation of knowledge (Gershom, 2013). This creation is formed through bodied collective experience that is affective, sensory, and spatial rather than experience funneled through conventional classroom communication. The drawings appear as important artifacts to make this non-linguistic knowledge visible (Figs. 9.6, 9.7, 9.8, 9.9).

9.6 Re-Creating Drawings in Extended Ecologies of Relations and Possibilities So far, we have developed the argument that both sound and mark-making carry openness and cannot be tied to just one meaning. They are rich and connected practices which help to refute the idea that learning has to be about representing what we already know. Through sound and mark-making, it is possible to see knowledge

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Fig. 9.6 “That’s me on the bridge”

Fig. 9.7 Re-exploring qualities of the bridge through mark-making

as it is embedded in particular spaces and in concert with objects and other material agents, forming and becoming part of new and different ecologies of relations (Wargo, 2017). Following this idea, in our practice we always make a point to value opportunities that enable us to re-engage children and their work for the sake of continuing to expand and explore potential relations, sensations, and connections that have not been explored yet (Vecchi, 2010).

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Fig. 9.8 Playing with a stick the concertina sounds

Fig. 9.9 Child listening to the sounds that he had recorded in the environment and mark-making in response

Through the use of projections, light, and sound we co-created an immersive environment that transformed the nursery into a fantastic space where children’s drawings became recreated in a larger scale, which they could see projected and modified by the room’s surfaces. Children continued intervening, altering their drawings by playing with shadows and the projections of other things onto their existing compositions. Although this activity used many components that are highly visual, such as drawings, color and shadows, our approach demonstrates how the analysis of children drawing cannot be reduced to an ocular-visual artifact. On the contrary‚ in the images (Fig. 9.10) we can see how visuality is articulated through atmospheric (light and projection), material (bodies moving, play with objects, sounds)

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Fig. 9.10 Drawings projected in an immersive environment recreated in the classroom

spatial (the rearticulation of space), and virtual (the memories and sensations accumulated in the multiple journeys through the city and other project activities) (Bruno, 2017), the activity brings about an understanding of children’s drawings as part of an intersubjective, haptic, and textured world. Later in the year, we curated an exhibition at CUBE Young People’s Gallery, situated in the sadly disappeared space of the Centre for the Urban Built Environment, in Manchester. Being in one of the major institutional art spaces in the city allowed children’s knowledge to be visible in a larger public arena. This, in turn, educated the larger public on an image of children as creative, critical, and collaborative thinkers and citizens (Cagliari et al., 2016; Vecchi, 2010). It showed how children are more interested in knowledge-production when activity allows the creative explorations of questions connected to their experiences in the world rather than an engagement with already formulated knowledge that they need to acquire and repeat (Olsson, 2013). In this context, children’s drawing matters because it is a site where the complexity of the creativity of children’s knowledge and the development of complex connections with the world becomes visible. In relating and experiencing such knowledge-connections, through sites like the exhibition at the CUBE Young People’s Gallery, new relationalities between bodies, spaces, and materials become possible through environments that teach, not because they use conventional modes of communication. Rather, these environments facilitate sensorial, atmospheric, and spatial attunement which helps all of us (children and adults) to rethink our bodies potential for re-materializing the places we dwell in ways that take on the creative force of the non-human (e.g. sound, light, gesture, space, time) (Grosz & Eisemann, 2001) (Fig. 9.11).

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Fig. 9.11 Gallery window of exhibition, a co-collaborative response to the children’s work in a gallery space. Projected images, drawings, models, audio visual sounds, and screens

References Acosta, E., & Duval, G. (2018). Hearing sonic textures: A fountain reciprocity with sound, embodied spaces and placemaking. In K. E. Y. Low, & D. Kalekin-Fishman (Eds.), Sense in cities: Experiences in Urban Settings. Routledge. Athey, C. (1990). Extending thought in young children: A parent-teachers partnership. Sage. Blesser, B., & Salter, L-R. (2009). Spaces speak, are you listening? Experiencing aural architecture. MIT Press. Cagliari, P., Castagnetti, M., Giudici, C, & Rinaldi, C. (2016). Loris Malaguzzi and the schools of Reggio Emilia: A selection of his writings and speeches, 1945–1993. Routledge. Ceppi, G., & Zini, M. (Eds.). (1998). Children, space, relations. Reggio Children. Department of Education. (2021). Development Matters Non-statutory curriculum guidance for the early years foundation stage. Department of Education Publishing Service. https://assets.pub lishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1004234/Dev elopment_Matters_Non-statutory_Curriculum_Guidance_Revised_July_2021.pdf Ellsworth, E. (2004). Places of learning: Media, architecture, pedagogy. Routledge. Gallagher, M., Hackett, A., Procter, L., & Scott, F. (2018). Vibrations in place: Sound and language in early childhood literacy practices. Educational Studies, 54(4), 465–482. https://doi.org/10. 1080/00131946.2018.1476353 Gershom, W. (2011). Embodied knowledge: Sounds as educational systems. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 27(2), 66–81. Gershom, W. (2013). Vibrational affect: Sound theory and practice in qualitative research. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 14(4), 257–262. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708613488067 Grosz, E., & Eismann, P. (2001). Architecture from the outside: Essays on virtual and real space. MIT Press. Ingold, T. (2000). The perception of the environment: Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. Routledge. Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Routledge.

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Marranca, B. (2019). Foreword: Drawing life. In M. Foá, J. Grisewood, B. Hosea & Carli McCall (Eds.), Performance drawing: New practices since 1945. Bloomsbury. Kindle iOS version. Olsson, L. M. (2013). Taking children’s question seriously: The need for creative thought. Global Studies of Childhood, 3(3), 230–253. https://doi.org/10.2304/gsch.2013.3.3.230 Rasmussen, E. S. (1962). Experiencing architecture. MIT Press. Sakr‚ M.‚ & Osgood‚ J. (2019). Postdevelopmental approaches to childhood art. Bloomsbury. TASC. (2013). Place + Children = Learning. The Architecture School for Children. https://www. tascmanchester.com Vecchi, V. (2010). Art and creativity in Reggio Emilia: Exploring the role of ateliers in early childhood education. Routledge. Wargo, J. M. (2017). Rhythmic rituals and emergent listening: Intra-activity, sonic sounds and digital composing with young children. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 17(3), 392–408. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468798417712573

Afterword Jayne Osgood

This book has occupied my thoughts for several months. Knowing that the deadline for this piece of writing has passed (several times), I was unable to speed up my engagements with what this treasure trove has to offer the childhood scholar. I tried to get through the book with as much efficiency as the task demanded but persistently found myself foraging, returning, gestating, turning over the richness that each chapter and visual essay had to offer. Making connections, tracing threads, revisiting QR codes that took me to videos of children in action, and thumbing back through to find images that arrested my attention the first time but offered something else the next. This is indeed a rich, intricate, and generative collection of provoking and enlivening contributions from young children and a range of great thinker-doers. This book matters. What has gripped me the most in my on-going engagements with this volume though, is the centrality of the child. The editors promised new images of thought in the study of childhood drawing, and whilst this collection achieves that, I would argue that it offers much more. Posthumanist approaches to the study of childhood invite us (that is researchers, parents, artists, practitioners—adults) to let go of our sense of being all-knowing experts and instead embrace the surprises that deep hanging out with children can (and usually does) generate. We are offered beautifully theorized, and carefully articulated (multimodal) accounts of the delicate social dance that occurs whilst children navigate the worlds of which they form a part, and actively produce through everyday encounters. What the reader is also invited to wrestle with is the profoundly important work that the contributors to this book undertake by recognizing and valuing the force of the material and the more-than-human—and J. Osgood Middlesex University, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Trafí-Prats and C. M. Schulte (eds.), New Images of Thought in the Study of Childhood Drawing, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07143-0

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what this means for ethics, social justice, and children’s ongoing entanglements with the world. Upturning and disrupting the prevailing images of drawing in early childhood is a core thread that courses through the entire volume. This matters if we are to break free from the confines and limitations of anthropocentric, logocentric, rationalist logic that stifles what else might be possible. Another logic is needed, one that makes space for a reconceptualization of the child that celebrates worldly entanglements and the unanticipated and unasked for. For too long a developmentalist logic has provided the dominant lens through which early childhood art is understood, with profound implications for the ways in which children’s artful practices are routinely devalued and often dismissed when they disrupt linear trajectories that demand some form of mastery toward adulthood. The ages and stages notion of child development characterized by predictable milestones provides the basis for most arts curricula and pedagogical approaches to art-making in neo-liberal contexts, with devastating effects when children fall outside normative expectations. This logic also limits educators’ worldviews and expectations; frequently they become narrowly preoccupied with what children’s mark-making means, or how it denotes school readiness against a predetermined set of developmental milestones. As a consequence, space and opportunity for playful improvization and experimentation are lost. Not only this though, when adults become preoccupied with measuring and assessing in order to determine a child’s normative development, processes of marginalization and othering are set in motion. These processes have lifelong consequences and need to be called to account—this book does important work in this respect. Taking up a collective commitment to social justice involves being concerned with the everyday lived experiences of the marginalized, the silenced, lost, and forgotten—sadly children too frequently fall into these categories when developmentalist logic shapes how we view and encounter them. Each chapter and visual essay in this book powerfully illustrate that other ways to imagine the child are entirely possible, and further, such processes of reimagining open up vital opportunities to take seriously what children say, do, draw and think. It is by de-familiarizing received wisdom about children that the pursuit of another logic becomes available. But as Schulte (2019, p. 92) has asked previously: is the field of art education ready to think about children’s drawings in ways that work against the seductiveness of the humanist frameworks, categories, classifications, and thematizations that currently define it? This volume provides a convincing case that the field should be ready to work against humanist frameworks because what becomes available when that happens is extraordinary. In various ways the authors in this book illustrate that when children are given access to, and are celebrated for engaging in spontaneous art, the messy, the untamed, the carnivalesque is permitted to unfurl. It is through these emergent processes that there is much to be learnt from eventful intensities that refuse to be pinned down. When children’s drawings are viewed as something other than representations of the world, as something other than an output to be decoded, classified, and given value, then pedagogical work can become more playful and open. Throughout this

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volume drawings are understood as emerging from and being embedded within morethan-human processes, this is significant for many reasons chief among them the possibilities that are created to attune to the ethics of encounter that permit oddness, strangeness, and wildness to find expressions without fear of inciting judgment. The freedom that posthumanist approaches make possible in children’s artistic encounters, and the endless avenues that open up for adults to explore and experiment with the child, are powerfully conveyed throughout this book. Providing a timely reminder to the fields of art education and childhood studies, to ask what else and what if when contemplating what children’s drawings make possible. A process ontology frames the arguments put forward by contributors to this book, and this framing underscores a shared commitment to view children’s artful practices as emergent, as disruptive, as subversive, as situated, and ultimately, as lively. By focussing on processes rather than outcomes research with children becomes inherently more nuanced, complex, and fundamentally more political. It is by taking children and their artful experimentations seriously that another, posthumanist logic, that attends to matter, affect, movement, stories, relationalities, and temporalities— finds expression and works to offer other accounts of why and how childhood art matters. The windows that are so generously opened into family homes and unlikely spaces for art to unfold provides a texture and quality to the writings in this volume that lingers long after the reading is done. The care with which authors articulate ideas through their close attunement to children’s artistic practices is a dynamic and affective project. I have returned to entries in this volume on numerous occasions; the story-telling and passionate engagements (that span times, places, generational relationships) persistently agitate, haunt, and provoke some form of sensory response. This feltness does not typically find expression in writings about childhood drawing but, in this book, it takes on an effervescent quality that demands the reader’s response to the vitality as it is theorized and crafted through images, video extracts, and playfully serious lines of argument. This lively project has capacities to draw the reader in time and again, and invites us to sit with fresh optics and new ways to navigate through what childhood art has to teach us; to consider the baggage that needs to be set aside; recognize the value in un-learning, and to fully embrace what a posthumanist sensibility has to offer our conceptualizations of the child. In summary, this collection has left an indelible impression that is at once unsettling and hopeful. Engaging with the stories, ideas, provocations, and musings presented throughout this book has left residues and resonated in ways I could not have anticipated. It is by offering possibilities to re-imagine children’s drawings as more-than-human ecologies made up of entangled bodies, materialities, times, memories, and spaces that habitual thoughts and practices become displaced. This volume is a manifesto of sorts, it invites the reader to fully grapple with why and how children’s drawings matter; and it underscores an imperative to embrace uncertainty and speculative not-knowing. Children’s drawings, and the embodied, haptic, relational processes involved in their coming into being, matters. As lively becomings, children’s art is generative of other ways to be in the world. This

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book insists that we take children’s drawings seriously and recognize the capacities inherent within them as an invitation to dwell upon discomforts, recognitions, injustices, and uncertainties. Such a shift in focus emphasizes precisely what another logic makes possible. New Images of Thought in the Study of Childhood Drawing makes visible what becomes possible when the child is afforded space for playful experimentation and offers an insightful guide that can assist researchers, parents, artists, and educators to challenge the limitations of dominant approaches to childhood art and instead find joy in exploring what else is unfolding through lively, everyday unfurlings.

Reference Schulte, C. M. (2019). Wild encounters: A more-than-human approach to children’s drawing. Studies in Art Education, 60(2), 92–102. https://doi.org/10.1080/00393541.2019.1600223