Understanding children’s perspectives of classroom writing practices through drawings

Abstract

Examining how young children learn to write is increasingly important as global society moves further towards a knowledge economy, where the production of texts of various kinds is an increasingly ubiquitous practice in everyday life and work. While there has been recent policy and practice focus on children’s writing performance in standardised tests, in this article, the authors focus on what can be learned by listening to children’s voices as they are engaged in ‘draw and talk’ methodologies. While children’s drawings have a material reality, they are also representations of children’s perceptions of their experiences with learning to write. In this article, the authors explore the processes, practices and relationships involved in learning to write, depicted in children’s drawings when they are asked to draw themselves learning to write. The authors identify representations of writing, evident in the children’s drawings focusing the relational, the material and the spatial elements of writing.

Pictographic Representations of the Word “Nature” in Preschool Education Children

“…The same happens in written language, and, as children begin to write, they develop their relational principles because they must relate them to their own ideas, concepts, or meanings. Pictographic writing is children's first approach to writing in an attempt to represent written language, objects, meanings, or conceptualizations (Brandt, 2015;Baroutsis et al, 2019).…”

“…Studies have shown that drawing is an appropriate strategy to gather information about how children perceive certain places, processes, or events. Some examples of studies utilizing this strategy are Baroutsis et al (2019), where children were asked to draw how they explain the process of learning to write; Highet et al (2019) measured the social impact of H. pylori in children through drawings, and also Moragón and Martínez (2016), who conducted a study to describe the way in which primary school children represent children's play through drawings. The results concluded that drawings are a representation of the reality that children perceive, and the majority presented real elements about the research topic.…”

Sociomaterial Dimensions of Early Literacy Learning Spaces: Moving Through Classrooms with Teacher and Children

“…As the classroom is a social space, a negotiated space, (Comber, 2016;Dyson, 2016), young children need to learn to navigate this unfamiliar territory and they need to learn to read classroom life as a dynamic phenomenon. For example, the child seated near the teacher's desk comes to realise that s/he is often the subject of teacher attention, sometimes to be helped, sometimes to be scolded (Baroutsis, Kervin, Woods, & Comber, 2017). In the process, learning identities are constructed (Marsh, 2016).…”

Children resisting deficit: What can children tell us about literate lives?

“…This seemingly minor focus on family involvement needs to be understood in the context of children's low overall responses to collaboration when writing. For example, only 26% of children drew pictures that included any collaborations with either teachers, their classmates or members of their family (Baroutsis, Kervin, Woods et al, 2017). Most children in this survey represented writing as a solitary activity.…”

“…When children were asked about who helps them with their writing, just under a third of the responses identified family members as being significant in the children’s writing experiences. By way of comparison, based on 274 instances where children identified ‘who’ helps them with writing, 29% indicated family members and 38% identified their teachers (Baroutsis, Kervin, Woods et al, 2017). Of the 29% of responses that identified family members as being involved in their writing, parents and siblings were the main sources of support for writing.…”