Scaffolding Drawing in Youth Resilience Development

• In Event: Exploring Daily Social Transactions of Resilient Youth in Various Contexts Around the Globe

Abstract

This paper follows through on an early years ethnographic ‘day in the life’ investigation of intergenerational exchanges surrounding youthful graphic representational development in order to explore contexts of symbol systems developments in resilient adolescents. Our earlier work investigated familial support of thriving toddlers’ scribbles and drawings in a range of global contexts (Authors, 2009; 2010). Parents played varying roles in scaffolding their young children’s graphic representations from gently supportive comments, to directive stimulation, to role modeling, to simply setting the stage for graphic expression, their mutuality in their symbol system activities being significant examples of promotive developmental exchanges (Sameroff, 2010), and indeed, enjoyable ‘joint attentional events (Authors, 2010, p.440)’.
Our ‘day in the life’ investigative method engages participants in the videoing of an entire day of personal involvements and exchanges. In investigating resilient adolescents, we adapted our methodology (Author, 2011) to focus more specifically on the reflective perceptions of the teen participants themselves. We interviewed them before and after the videoed day; we showed them a compilation disc and encouraged them to comment on their daily activities and to explain their understanding of their own thriving.
In the current case study analysis we systematically explore, using techniques developed in our examination of the symbol systems of younger participants, the drawings of one adolescent in his extensive (one-and-one-half hour) drawing session during the day we spent with him, in association with interchanges between his father and him and his reflections on the significance of these interchanges in his graphic representational development and thriving. This participant, Pond (his self-chosen pseudonym) was 14 years old when we conducted our observations with him. He lived with his father who had just moved from Bangkok to Chiang Mai a smaller, northern Thai community and who had opened a noodle shop on the side of their home to support the family, temporarily leaving his wife and daughter behind in Bangkok. Pond and his father are both talented graphic artists and both appear to take pride in the boy’s skill development. We filmed Pond replicating models of traditional Thai art that his father had purchased for him to emulate and he also showed us many samples of Japanese manga comics and comics with English texts that he enjoyed adapting to his own purposes. (Author, 2011, have specifically explored Pond’s cartooning.) Pond’s father rewards Pond for his engagement in drawing by giving him warm verbal praise and physical nurturance, as well as spending money for the time he allots to drawing. We inspect the nature of the development of this talented boy’s symbol system skills and explore with him the contributions he feels his father’s engagement, the quality and quantity of time he spends, and his own drive for improvement contribute to his successes as well as the role this skill development plays in his resilience in the context of a challenging migration in search of a more secure family life.

Authors

• Giuliana Pinto, University of Florence

• Sombat Tapanya, Chiang Mai University

• Catherine Ann Cameron, The University of British Columbia