New Images of Thought in the Study of Childhood Drawing

Book excerpt: 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.