Tracing Children's Art to "See and Sense More"

• In Event: (Re)Tracing, (Un)Curating, and (An)Archiving Children's Artistic Productions: Sophisticated Scribbles and the Influence of Rhoda Kellogg

Abstract

Children produce art as one mode of being in the world (Gallas, 1994), and as any parent or early childhood educator knows, the maintenance of children’s aesthetic productions is no easy feat. Oftentimes children’s art is discarded by adults or the children themselves, either because of the sheer number of productions or because of the ease with which we “dismiss early scribbling as meaningless activity” or “treat the art…as an imperfect record of their surroundings” (Kellogg, 1969, p. 1). Rhoda Kellogg’s archive forces us to ask what our responsibilities are to children and their textual productions. If we understand children’s artistic creations to be a form of ‘voice’, how do we look in ways that help us get closer? What does it mean to see and to potentially share vision with children, both in the literal and in the figurative sense?
This paper explores tracing children’s drawings, a practice shared by Kellogg, as a mode of inquiry in qualitative, image-based research. Employed in my research with children’s photographs (Author, 2018), prior to learning about Kellogg’s own strategies for tracing, I position looking at children’s art as an active process in which adults find ways to engage sensually with the work. Therefore, ‘looking’ is abstracted to be a set of sensory observations, and working with Tishman’s (2018) ‘slow looking’, I discuss tracing as “a way of gaining knowledge about the world” (p. 2) of children. Tim Ingold (2011) writes about the interrelatedness of the visual, aural, touch and feeling perceptions. Vision is often reduced to object, image, and interpretation (Ingold, 2011) when an active engagement with our worlds means that looking also includes other sensory modalities. As a form of sensuous scholarship (Stoller, 1997), tracing involves the movement of hands and eyes in coordination, a kind of mimesis of children’s movements. Tracing, in my formulation of it, is a mode of inquiry that forces the adult to ask how children’s lines can guide us out of our adult senses and into children’s. What kinds of textures, rhythms, and sensations are evoked when we are in conversation with children’s drawings? What kinds of questions does this practice provoke?
With a collection of drawings from 8-year-old Parker (featured in the previous paper), I engage in the process of tracing as a way to see and know more. Using the variety of virtual tools available on an iPad app (pencil, pen, watercolor), I outline the shapes and contours in Parker’s drawings and use the watercolor application to apply color that match the color in the drawing itself. A process in which I record narration while tracing allows me to revisit the silences and pauses of feeling my way through the drawings. In doing this, I illustrate the ways that this process can allow us to sense more about the text as a part of the larger assemblage of Parker, his symbolic culture (Corsaro, 2018) of superheroes, and the materials and resources he has at hand.

Author

• Tran Templeton, University of North Texas