Children's Perspectives on Drawing: Teaching and Learning to Draw in and Outside Ofelementary School

This book investigates children's preferredstrategies for learning to draw. Twenty-six Grade 6students engaged in three different drawing tasks(observation, feeling, and cartoon), and generatedtheir favoured strategies for improving their drawingskills. Students then ranked their top threestrategies for each drawing task. In addition, sixstudents were interviewed about their drawingexperiences and development, both inside and outsideof school. Results indicated that the participantsdesired to improve their drawing skills through avariety of strategies that reflected their outside ofschool practices such as copying, tracing, gettingideas from others, drawing with others, and watchingTV to get ideas. Help provided by the teacher andthrough interactions with others were also highlyfavored. The interview results further outlinedparticipants' desires to improve, their perceptionsof a lack of help for drawing at school, and theimportance of significant others in their drawingdevelopment. Recommendations are suggested forclassroom teachers to incorporate learners' ways ofknowing, thinking, and representing in art education.