Informal drawing and formal drawing teaching seen through the lenses of play theory
About Professor Liv Merete Nielsen's contribution to promoting visual competence
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7577/formakademisk.5174Keywords:
drawing, play, sociocultural theory, visual literacy, visual competence, visual control, modelling, imitation, mimesis, observational drawing, kindergarten, schoolAbstract
The article aims to shed light on children's drawing processes from a sociocultural perspective through Margareta Öhman's play-theoretical contributions. Öhman has the sociocultural theorist Lev Vygotsky's theory as perspective in her understanding of the importance of play in children's lives. Play can give children a wide range of experiences. Öhman describes the characteristics of play based on the following criteria: The strain of play is spontaneous and voluntary, fun, requires active engagement, does not have clear goals, is guided by motivation and provides a sense of control. Several of these characteristics can be recognized on the arena of informal drawing processes among kindergarten children and schoolchildren. Self-initiated and self-directed playful drawing processes with tools such as pencils, markers, brushes and paints are the analytical research units. The research question is therefore: How can informal drawing processes be understood as play and how can this understanding help support children and students in visually controlled drawing processes in formal drawing lessons? The case study is used as a methodological approach to explore two cases of informal drawing processes, one from kindergarten and one from school. In informal drawing, mastering the same visual expressions is often part of the playful universe. Mastering a universe when playing together and mastering the same visual expressions by modelling is part of the discovery. Modelling and mimesis (Nielsen 2019), becomes a possible entrance to link features of informal drawing processes, what Öhman calls inspiration for imitation, to the formal drawing pedagogy in schools and kindergartens. This may be a possible motivation for learning to draw, thus promoting what professor Liv Merete Nielsen defines as visual literacy, that is, visual competence to create and understand images and drawings.
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