New Images of Thought in the Study of Childhood Drawing

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.

Laura Trafí-Prats is Senior Lecturer at the School of Education at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU), and former Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is a member of the Children and Childhood Research Group at MMU. Her research and pedagogy connects arts, childhood, place and materiality with an interest for experimental and creative approaches that decenter and decolonise the study of childhood and young people. Her work has been published in journals like Studies in Art Education, Qualitative Inquiry, Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, and Genealogy. She has contributed with authored chapters to numerous edited volumes, including Postdevelopmental approaches to Childhood Art, and Communities of Practice: Art, Play and Aesthetics in Early Childhood.

Christopher Schulte is an Endowed Associate Professor of Art Education in the School of Art at the University of Arkansas, where he also serves as Director of the Center for the Study of Childhood Art. Informed by new materialist, new empiricist, and posthumanist approaches, his scholarship, teaching, and community engagement focus on the artistic, play-based and aesthetic practices of young children, particularly critical orientations to the study of childhood drawing. His research has appeared in handbooks and other edited volumes, as well as numerous national and international peer-reviewed journals. He is co-editor of Visual Art With Young Children: Practice, Pedagogy, Learning, editor of Ethics and Research with Young Children: New Perspectives, and co-editor of Communities of Practice: Art, Play, and Aesthetics in Early Childhood.