Phenomena of Place: An Arts-Based Exploration of Children's Drawing and Ecocultural Identity

Abstract

We humans are cultural and ecological beings. This is a study about children’s drawing as a device for expressing intertwined cultural and ecological relations. Countless studies have examined children’s drawing from psychological, anthropological, linguistic, and aesthetic perspectives, while recently posthuman perspectives have put forward notions of drawing as material entanglement. Because of its apparent instinctual process and popularity as modes of expression and communication, drawing is often utilized as a tool for facilitating learning and instrumented as a momentary visualization of a child’s perspective. Few studies concerning children’s drawing have attempted to examine the possibilities of intersubjectivity between humans and nonhumans, or the affective forces that shape children’s participation in social and ecological systems. In this arts-based education research (ABER) study located in the southwestern high desert of the current U.S., I examine children’s drawing practices occurring within a science-informed environmental learning setting in connection with ecocultural identity. I employ a conceptual framework of place as sensed experiences amid relational assemblages (Booth, 2008, 2015; Casey, 1996; Tsing, 2015) and a theoretical foundation of sympoiesis, or making-with (Haraway, 2016). I submit a methodology of “lichenizing” inspired by the heterogeneous making-with of Lichens, consisting of methods drawn from visual ethnography, multispecies ethnography, and arts-based research. I ask the following research questions: How do children’s graphical meaning-making manifest the a/effect of the assemblage of place? How do human/nonhuman collaborations prompt and influence the formation of ecocultural identity? Data were generated over 10 months through participant and place observations, participant drawings, and unstructured interviews, and include video recordings and detailed memos of drawing events, and photographs of the children’s drawings created individually and collaboratively. In my interpretation of the data, I tell interspecies stories of drawing events and intersperse the writing with small drawing interludes. The illuminations of this study offer relational ways of understanding drawing as co-produced by multifarious forces and entities that link to the formation of children’s ecocultural identities. This study highlights a critical need to continually examine the ways in which multidisciplinary, ecocentric education for children is conceived, constructed, and carried out, and to be more attentive to the ways in which children respond.