Children Making Meaning: Exploring Drawings, Narratives, and Identities

This ground-breaking text highlights the value of drawing as a meaningful way for children to communicate, demonstrating how it is inextricably linked with children’s everyday experiences, thinking processes, imagination, emotions, and learning.

By exploring what intrigues and concerns children, Children Making Meaning: Exploring Drawings, Narratives, and Identities demonstrates how drawing is so much more than an insignificant pastime. Illustrated throughout, this book includes examples of children’s drawings to explore and explain the processes, relationships, and modes they use, as well as the themes and meanings that emerge from them. Practical case study material illuminates the complexity of children’s thinking, intentions, and knowledge as they find creative and individual ways to convey their thoughts, fears, excitements, contentments, and fascinations. This book also explores the relationship between drawing and talk and how children’s ongoing drawing-narratives help them to develop and change their meanings as they draw.

Accessibly combining relevant theories with numerous original examples, this essential resource is a must-read for educators and other professionals who use children’s drawings in their work. It will also be useful for parents who wish to support their children’s drawing activities and extend such opportunities at home.

Josephine Deguara is Senior Lecturer in Early Childhood and Primary Education at the University of Malta, Malta.

Cathy Nutbrown is Professor of Education at The University of Sheffield, UK.