The Prosthetic Materialities of Children’s Drawing: Inquiry Without Organs

• In Event: Deleuze, Guattari, and Art Education

Abstract

Objectives
Informed by Charles Garoian’s (2013) book The prosthetic pedagogy of art: Embodied research and practice, the author of this essay employs the concept of prosthesis as a means to stimulate an encounter with the spatial and processual rhythms of children’s drawing. In doing so, the author considers the extent to which, in and through the spatial-processual complexities of children’s drawing, “bodies interconnect with and incorporate the materiality of art practice, cultural artifacts, and other bodies in the world” (Garoian, 2013, p. 123). Further, the author of this essay seeks to establish a correspondence between Garoian’s pedagogic tenor for prosthesis and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s (1987) articulation of a body without organs (BwO) and, in doing so, aims to nudge into existence a different sensibility for thinking about and living creatively through inquiry. Specific attention is given to the prosthetic materialities of children’s drawing and the degree to which, when conceptualized as such, inquiry necessitates new and unforeseen creative possibilities.

Theoretical framework
The author of this essay writes through a theoretical composition that draws from the arts-based pedagogies of Charles Garoian (2013), the conceptual prose of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987), and the new materialist lines of Karen Barad (2007) and Jane Bennett (2001, 2010).

Methods
Informed by the post-qualitative leans of Elizabeth St. Pierre (1997, 2011) and Wanda Pillow (2003), the author of this essay attends to the rhythms of his qualitative “case” work with young people and the degree to which this work, as a prosthetic entanglement of materialities and affects, constitutes a porous, yet contentious and connective, practice of inquiry.

Data
In addition to open qualitative work and the material that it tends to cultivate (i.e., observations and field notes), the author of this essay uses video and photographic techniques (Glesne, 2006), what Claudia Mitchell (2011) calls “participatory visual approaches” (p. 4) to listen to, confront, and finesse the qualitative and pedagogic scene in which “data” is situated and from which it emerges.

Results
This essay aims to advance an argument that nudges existing research and theory about children’s drawing into connections with new materialisms perspectives. In doing so, the author of this essay seeks to honor and explicate underrepresented spatial and processual rhythms that condition and mediate children’s drawing and the practice of researching these events.

Significance
This essay forwards multiple implications for the study and theorization of children’s drawing, post-qualitative inquiry, and the pedagogical relations that exist between young people and adults while inquiring into and about the world through drawing.

Author

• Christopher Mark Schulte, University of Georgia - Athens