New Images of Thought in the Study of Childhood Drawing

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

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2. An Introduction: For New Images of Thought in the Study of Children’s Drawings

   • Laura Trafí-Prats, Christopher M. Schulte

   Pages 1-26

3. Are We There Yet?: In Search of Drawing Events in Early Childhood

   • Christine Marmé Thompson

   Pages 27-42

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

   • Dennis Atkinson

   Pages 43-62

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

   • Christopher M. Schulte

   Pages 63-79

6. Curves, Sways, Loops, Folds and Witches’ Traps: Sensing Duration in Sylvie’s Drawings

   • Laura Trafí-Prats

   Pages 81-102

7. Drawing and Being Drawn by the Hand: A Dance of Animacy

   • Sylvia Kind

   Pages 103-117

8. Strawing: Perpetual Line

   • Lucy Hill, Alice Lyons

   Pages 119-135

9. Drawing as Felt

   • Marissa McClure Sweeny, Robert Sweeny, Stella Sweeny, Luca Sweeny

   Pages 137-157

10. City as Soundscape: Sounding-Drawings and Drawing-Sounds as (Re)creations of Urban Space

    • Dan Wheatley, Catherine Clements

    Pages 159-174

11. Back Matter

    Pages 175-178

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This book provides a revitalised account of the study of children’s drawing by outlining a departure from existing approaches privileging developmentalist accounts and presenting drawing as a specialised human endeavour separated from other material entanglements constituting children’s everyday experiences. The book takes on current developments in the fields of early childhood arts and early childhood literacies to advocate for process-oriented, new materialist and decolonial approaches that re-conceptualise the study of children’s drawing. It proposes a future-oriented approach, centred on thinking experimentally with a focus on nonrepresentational elements, such as movement, sensation, intensity, rhythm, story and place, which singularly assemble in drawing events. Thus, the book discusses drawing as a process of sense-making that is not enclosed in the individualised body of the child and that unfolds corporeally in time and space. It revises the relation of drawing with symbolisation by suggesting that the use of language and signs in drawing form in entanglement with matter and sensation in processes of creative speculation connected with the movement of thought. Presenting a series of contributions by internationally recognised scholars and artists, the book aims to create synergies between theory and practice that speak of everyday realities interconnecting children, learning and sense-making.

• childhood drawing
• posthumanism new materialism
• postdevelopmental contemporary childhoods
• Sense Studies in Education
• Community Education
• visual and material literacies
• Art Education
• study of children’s drawing
• teacher education
• childhood studies

• Faculty of Education, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK

  Laura Trafí-Prats

• School of Art, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, USA

  Christopher M. Schulte

Laura Trafí-Prats is Senior Lecturer at the School of Education at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU), and former Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is a member of the Children and Childhood Research Group at MMU. Her research and pedagogy connects arts, childhood, place and materiality with an interest for experimental and creative approaches that decenter and decolonise the study of childhood and young people. Her work has been published in journals like Studies in Art Education, Qualitative Inquiry, Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, and Genealogy. She has contributed with authored chapters to numerous edited volumes, including Postdevelopmental approaches to Childhood Art, and Communities of Practice: Art, Play and Aesthetics in Early Childhood.

Christopher Schulte is an Endowed Associate Professor of Art Education in 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 new materialist, new empiricist, and posthumanist approaches, his scholarship, teaching, and community engagement focus on the artistic, play-based and aesthetic practices of young children, particularly critical orientations to the study of childhood drawing. His research has appeared in handbooks and other edited volumes, as well as numerous national and international peer-reviewed journals. He is co-editor of Visual Art With Young Children: Practice, Pedagogy, Learning, editor of Ethics and Research with Young Children: New Perspectives, and co-editor of Communities of Practice: Art, Play, and Aesthetics in Early Childhood. 

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