Room for monsters and writers: Performativity in children’s classroom drawing

Abstract

Much research on children’s classroom drawing emerged from an interest in the relationships between drawing and early writing and focused on drawing as a pedagogical tool to engage young children in planning, generating, and illustrating story ideas. In an eight-month case study of children’s drawing in a kindergarten language arts curriculum, the author focused on children’s classroom drawing not as a pedagogical intervention, but as an emergent event in which the intra-actions of children, drawing, and discourses coalesce. Of the many findings from this project, prevalent is the notion that children’s drawing and drawings function as vehicles for more than just pre-literacy—that drawing and drawings produce critical, creative, and constructive thinking and learning. In this article, the author discusses children’s drawing and drawings as events in which the often divergent interests of children, teachers, and curriculum materialize. Butler’s and Barad’s notions of performativity—the ways in which bodies materialize larger social discourses, such as gender—help the author to make sense of the ways children perform popular culture discourses, such as “monster,” or local classroom discourses, such as “writer,” in the kindergarten classroom. In looking at children’s drawing and drawings as material, discursive, and productive events, the author hopes to expand perceptions of children’s drawing beyond indicators of development, aesthetics, or literacy acquisition into critical, creative, and constructive learning experiences with significant cultural implications.

Reimagining joy as a performative force in early childhood education

“…Drawing on Barad (2007), the children's Storybooks can be read as a material-discursive practice, where performativity is attended to as various material-discursive practices, which, in turn, produce different material configurings of the world (see also Penn, 2020). The performances of joy in the empirical material were attended to from a relational and cultural perspective (Karjalainen and Puroila, 2017;Kuby, 2014;Nordström et al, 2021), also resting on my theoretical and cultural knowledge.…”

“…The rationale of this paper is to engage with joy as an affective and performative force in everyday life in early childhood education, pushing against binary thinking that separates, for example, humans from non-humans, nature from culture, the mind from the body, or theory from practice (Murris and Bozalek, 2019; Niccolini and Ringrose, 2020). With performativity instead of representationalism (Vannini, 2015), the objective is not to neatly categorize what happens in early childhood education, but to think, see and feel with what joy as a force can do. While in representational notions knowledge generation is bound to verbal language and a reality exists independently of the researcher, in performative notions, humans, more-than-humans and entanglements are always becoming (Leander and Boldt, 2013).…”

“…Performativity offers an alternative to representationalism, as the focus shifts from issues of correspondence between descriptions and reality, as well as the power of words to represent pre-existing things, to matters of practices, actions, doings and becomings (Barad, 2003; Koro-Ljungberg et al, 2018; Vannini, 2015). Barad's (2007) notion of response-ability (both ethical responsibility and the ability to respond) encourages us to look at everything, seen or unseen, as agentive.…”

“…Further, the approach suggests an attentiveness to the assemblages constituted by the physical, temporal and spatial aspects of young children's everyday practices (Burnett et al, 2020). This non-representational methodology (Vannini, 2015) seeks to reimagine established ways of thinking and seeing by orienting to the affect, the unsaid, and the incompleteness and openness of unfolding events (see also Nordström et al, 2021). Hence, the practical provocation offered above is not claiming to reconstruct or represent the moment, but rather suggests a novel way to think about affect with theory (Jackson and Mazzei, 2013).…”

Collaborative drawing: A creative tool for examination of infant–toddler pedagogical practices

“…In early childhood education, researchers have used drawing, for example, to interpret and represent children's lived experiences and events (Agbenyega, 2014;Mackenzie & Veresov, 2013). Drawings offer a material and discursive indicator of children's creative learning experiences (Penn, 2019). Further, drawings as signs are a form of expressing ideas, and a complex way to represent children's thinking (Mackenzie & Veresov, 2013).…”