Art teachers have inherited unreconciled attitudes toward the teaching of drawing, which stem from an unresolved conflict between interventionists and non-interventionists. The resulting fragmentation of teaching practises is further confounded by consideration of the "crisis in confidence" period of drawing development that surfaces in grade four. In an effort to provide a clearer definition of the teacher's role in the drawing class, this study examined the practises of four exemplary art specialists^ Descriptive research techniques were employed in the observation of 27 drawing lessons, nine each at the grade two, four and six levels. Recorded dialogue was analyzed using Kakas' Peer Interaction Typology and Clements' Questioning Typology, and it was found that peers at all grades spoke most often about their own drawing experiences or artwork, and that teachers used mostly indirect questioning strategies when interacting with students. Data collected regarding initiators of interactions revealed that with increasing age came decreasing amounts of student initiated interaction, together with increasing amounts of teacher initiated interaction. It was also found that there was a paucity of peer interaction at the grade four level, and that in-process viewing of peers' artwork was an important component of the drawing lesson. Within a supportive environment, interaction generally ranged from neutral to positive.

Art teachers have inherited unreconciled attitudes toward the teaching of drawing, which stem from an unresolved conflict between interventionists and non-interventionists. The resulting fragmentation of teaching practises is further confounded by consideration of the "crisis in confidence" period of drawing development that surfaces in grade four. In an effort to provide a clearer definition of the teacher's role in the drawing class, this study examined the practises of four exemplary art specialists^ Descriptive research techniques were employed in the observation of 27 drawing lessons, nine each at the grade two, four and six levels. Recorded dialogue was analyzed using Kakas' Peer Interaction Typology and Clements' Questioning Typology, and it was found that peers at all grades spoke most often about their own drawing experiences or artwork, and that teachers used mostly indirect questioning strategies when interacting with students. Data collected regarding initiators of interactions revealed that with increasing age came decreasing amounts of student initiated interaction, together with increasing amounts of teacher initiated interaction. It was also found that there was a paucity of peer interaction at the grade four level, and that in-process viewing of peers' artwork was an important component of the drawing lesson. Within a supportive environment, interaction generally ranged from neutral to positive. / Education, Faculty of / Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of / Graduate

Using an ecological systems approach, this qualitative study examined how continuously evolving, personal living experiences and the ideologies and attitudes of their material, folk, and school culture come to be (re) presented in the construction of images and meaning in children’s artwork. The research was conducted with three groups of fifth-grade students facilitated by the art teacher at their schools in three different countries: United States, Greece, and Ghana. Data in the form of a set of autobiographical drawings from observation, memory, and imagination with written commentary were created by each participant and supported with responses to questionnaires and correspondences from teachers and parents. The sets of drawings were analyzed in terms of how the drawings reflect the children’s (a) artistic expression as mediated by their interaction with local and media influences and (b) sense of self, agency, or purpose. The findings strongly suggest that style, details, content, and media use assumed a dominant role within the drawings. Furthermore, these results were reflected differently in the drawings of the cohort from each country. Having considered the set of drawings each child made as a network of enterprise emphasizes the active role the children played in the production of the artwork, involving their choices of theme and content, the media images incorporated, and the means by which a task was adapted to suit their interests. However, the results also show that the specific skills—drawing from observation, memory, and imagination—required by the four drawing tasks had a tempering effect on their creative output, leading to the conclusion that the children’s limited drawing experience constrained their ability to express themselves in pictorial representation with fluency. In view of these findings, lesson suggestions are designed to develop drawing skills across drawing modes in a rhizomatic manner of thinking. Suggestions for future research address exploring the evolution of children’s identity and sense of agency in the world through artistic expression; the role of the environment in which children draw as an embodied and embedded experience in a physical and sociocultural world; and further research into how and why children use images to communicate.

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