Children - Lesson 3: drawing in the classroom

Child

Hi. Sometimes it’s great to draw with other students in a group. You can use drawings as a way to think about something with your friends and classmates. At the end of the lesson is an example of a children’s class that made drawings about a story in the scriptures.

Adult/Teacher

Hello. This second lesson about the circumstances around children’s drawings moves into the classroom. Read what experts have to say about how art teachers can help children put more into their drawings. Then learn how that works in practice with a case study of a young class in church.

Nearly all children’s first experience of drawing takes place at home, but for school-age children, the second main site for drawing is in a classroom. That environment might be a public or private school, a home school, a religious class, or a gathering of children in the community. Perhaps it is formal art instruction—focused on making art itself—or maybe a class or gathering that uses art making as a tool to discuss other topics. A student walking into an art class for the first time is likely to be amazed at the tools, materials, and examples of art that expand what he has experienced before. For many children whose home did not include drawing regularly, in particular, classroom time dedicated to nothing but art making is a window to a new universe of expression.

However, for a child accustomed to drawing by herself since she could first hold a marker, the motivations for drawing change when they occur in a class. Whereas solo drawing is largely self-motivated—although with lots of parental encouragement, hopefully—a child’s classroom drawing assigned by an adult causes a mental shift to occur. This includes the source of inspiration. Children’s spontaneous drawings are largely sourced from memory, including fantasy. Academic classes in art, on the other hand, begin the crucial development of observation and a repertoire of techniques including concepts to generate ideas and present them graphically in increasingly sophisticated ways. In a class, she is no longer drawing primarily to please herself but to meet an educational objective, to please a teacher, and even to receive school credit. Working alongside peers can be its own motivation, too. The impetus for drawing changes at school and so do the interactions between child and adult. By nature, a class is less individualized, and that leads to a host of challenges and opportunities for a child. A teacher might not be as effusive as a parent has been; conversely, a teacher is likely to have more training, experience, and can facilitate creative and technical progress more thoroughly than the child has been accustomed to at home. Many parents are unable to draw effectively, but art teachers can both encourage and demonstrate.

What is art like in schools today?

Every country’s art education policies differ, but in the United States, according to the most recent government study (2009-2010), if you are an elementary school child, you have a visual arts class at least once a week (an average of 85% report that they do), the class meets throughout the school year (87%), in a room dedicated to visual art (68%). The class is taught by an art specialist (84%) using a curriculum guide issued by the school district (83%). This snapshot is somewhat the same for schools across the nation—although not as equitably distributed as it could be—and the statistics are similar to the previous study conducted one decade earlier. For most public school students in the U.S., elementary level art will be their first and last exposure to art classes in school, however. In U.S. secondary schools, art classes are not taught to all students. [1] [2]

If you teach a class of any kind, how can you assist a child in learning to draw? And if you are a parent, how can your child’s drawing at home complement formal class drawing? Let’s look at approaches to classroom instruction, acknowledging that a family can duplicate many—if not all of them—to some degree. From there, you can tailor activities at home, or if you are a teacher, borrow from some of the following lesson ideas.

Classroom Concepts

• Overcoming the bias of simplicity. We learn to draw things in simple ways when we are young children, and those processes stick. For example, in most children’s drawings, objects don’t overlap—although in real life, everything does. Instead, things are presented from standardized angles and points of view, human figures stand facing forward with limbs at right angles and are shown from eye level, movement is static, shading is rare, objects near and far are shown at the same size, the dimensions of the paper dictate the format and embellishments of the drawing, etc. Young children draw that way, and their technical skills limit them. Without exposure to a richer language of possibility, older children will continue to draw that way, too. In drawing, technique becomes vocabulary. The problem is that these graphic simplifications are inhibiting, artistically, and they run in opposition to graphic images all around them that are saturated with complexity. If a child can’t crack the code—if he can’t draw something that feels “real” to him or capture what he sees in the mind’s eye— it is likely that his frustration will likely lead to an abandonment of drawing, entirely. The solution? Develop projects that tackle each of the simplicity biases, mentioned above. Model and explain techniques and principles to encourage additional complexity. If your own drawings skills make that difficult, don’t forget that you can ask questions and guide the child toward complexity merely be saying, “What else?”

• Five types of drawing activities. In a classroom, a once-a-week art class is insufficient to become fluent. Art educators Brent Wilson, Al Hurwitz, and Marjorie Wilson, in their book, Teaching Drawing from Art, argue that children should draw every day. Some of this time will be with an art specialist, other time with their regular teacher, and there’s drawing time at home, of course, at whatever technical skill level your home possesses. But with so many approaches to drawing, what activities are preferable? The authors list five types of drawing activities: observational, memory, imagination/fantasy, verbal to visual, and experimental. [3] Observational refers to looking at something and drawing it. As fundamental as that sounds, most children will have not approached drawing in this way before they enter school. As young children, it is more likely that they drew from memory or from their imagination. When asked to draw a picture of their family, for example, few are the children who gather everybody together and sit down with paper and markers in front of them to create a portrait. They just remember what their family looks like and draw that. In the classroom, memory-based drawing remains important, of course, but as a child progresses through art classes, more and more of her time will be spent drawing from observing. There are other drawing sources for young artists, as well. Verbal cues like stories and poems or written descriptions of things or events can set up a drawing activity. Similarly, experimental drawing is a genre of exercise that stretches the boundaries of what is possible for a child. It assists drafting to become art.

• Art begets art. Children acquire drawings skills by looking at other drawings. They also experiment on their own, but very few of us create things that are unconnected to what has come before us. Younger children look at the drawings of older children, their parents, and others in order to see what is possible. “How do I draw a horse or a car? Oh, I see,” they say, as they encounter or remember someone else’s work. In a class setting, distinguished art works are important models, too. Showing a Rembrandt portrait to a child will not turn her into an Old Master or be overly intimidating, but the lessons to be extracted from looking will provide a developmental boost. Think of “draw” as in “draw from.” What can you draw from the works of others? When asked to respond to a painting, children will see concepts they haven’t solved yet for themselves, which will help them leapfrog, developmentally, over multiple steps of skill acquisition. Some of those include: How to depict crowds of people or groups of things, how to capture motion and action, how to mix real things and imaginary things, how to capture more and more details, how to express their subjects’ emotions, how visual scientific concepts of perspective, physics, and color function, and how different artists can approach the same basic idea in an infinite number of ways. As you select art works to share, include a broad range, which will reinforce the concepts that there are many ways to express oneself. Your goal is not to have the child slavishly copy someone else, but to model, mentor, and inspire.

• The art academy model. Visualize a 19th-century art academy: In a large room in a grandly ornate building, a group of intense, adult art students are dressed in suits and covered with smocks. They stand at large easels that turn away from a sculptural plaster cast or a live model on a pedestal or a still life composition in the center of the room. They pore over their works-in-progress for hours as their professor offers pointed critiques and issues didactic suggestions for more accurate visual depictions, all with the goal of honing their craft. Children’s classes are not art academies. In fact, making art is only one aspect of an art class. How to look at art, for example, is important, too. And yet, to draw comfortably, practice is required. Technique matters. It is unrealistic to imagine that a child could sit down and create an accomplished drawing without technical practice, nor could he hit a baseball without practice, ride a skateboard, or play a video game—all of which require repetition and evolving learning. For many children who draw, observational skills and technical mastery are the things they lack the most. Specifically, help students look at something and capture its shape and volume, the way the light strikes it, the shadows on it, and the shadows it creates on other objects. This process needn’t be dry and academic, nor should it be the only type of drawing activity you do. Still, one goal is to be able to look at something and put its image on paper.

• Drawing techniques. Very young children draw their subjects the same way, again and again. From drawing to drawing, their process largely repeats itself although it gradually becomes more specific and accomplished. One style fits all. Therefore, when they are slightly older, they might come to a class setting thinking, “This is how I draw.” They don’t realize that there are many ways to draw, many styles of drawing, and many skills that can give them more options of expression. Some of the lessons are a bit technical, but they are easily demonstrated. A child learns how a square can become a box by overlapping it with another square and connecting the corners, for example, or how with a little shading, a circle can become a ball. At home, you can employ these new concepts as your child makes additional drawings. Have him teach you what he is learning in the classroom. Let’s say he is learning that a house’s perspective includes a vanishing point, that a still life has a light source, or that objects close to you are foreshortened. Encourage him to articulate the technical principle to you, show you how he used it in a drawing, and have him coach you as you make your own version of the lesson. You might not be very good; your child will like that.

• Drawing from memory. In an art class, a child learns how to record an image in memory and bring it forward to draw it later. This is related to the spontaneous drawing of young children, but it includes skills of observation. Just as a chef relies on her palate when creating a restaurant dish—remembering what each element tastes like and imagining how they will combine in the recipe, without requiring endless trial and error or limitless combinations to verify it—an artist learns to see something (including seeing it in the imagination) and then draw it without having to experience it anew. Teaching Drawing from Art quotes two related thoughts from art history worth sharing. Edgar Degas said, “If I were to run an art-school I should take a tall house, and I should put the model and the beginners in the top story; and as a student’s work improved I should send him down a floor, until at last he would work upon the level of the street, and would have to run up six flights of stairs every time he wanted to look at the model.” [4] In Memories of James McNeil Whistler, the author recalls watching Whistler capture an image in memory. He would look intently at a scene, then he would turn his back and ask himself what he remembered. Next, he would turn to it again to check his memory, turn away, and repeat the process until he could reliably recall every element. [5] Children in a class learn techniques to express themselves graphically. They also learn how to remember—a valuable skill, indeed—which will help them the next time they begin to draw.

Class drawings in a Church setting: A Case Study

In a Primary class on Sunday, a group of seven and eight year old children in the New City Ward in Rockland County, New York read the scriptures and interpret them through drawings. The teacher, Brent Wilson, says, “It’s my belief that their drawings help fix gospel principles and scriptural events in the children’s minds.” For a lesson on Acts chapters 10-15, Brent read the chapters with two things in mind: “What were the most important gospel principles embedded within these scriptures—principles that children should know about and begin to understand? And what of the principles and surrounding events could I help the children to visualize and draw?” He settled on Acts 10 and its important lesson that the gospel of Jesus Christ is for everyone. He then abridged and printed for the children verses 1-7 about the good centurion Cornelius (v. 1-7), Peter’s vision of the unclean animals that he is commanded to eat (v. 9-22), and the meeting of Peter and Cornelius (v. 24-48).

This Latter-day Saint Valiant class draws regularly, and Brent’s next step was to decide what format the children should use to draw—they sometimes draw in narrative panels or on sheets without frames. In preparation, he drew his own episodes from Acts 10 in four frames:

In the class, Brent asked the children, “Is the gospel of Jesus Christ for everyone? Can anyone who repents join the church?” The children answered with a chorus of yeses. Then, the children learned that it wasn’t always that way, that there were Jews and Gentiles. Brent showed the children his four-frame drawing, pointed to the first frame showing Cornelius, and asked, “This is, a very good man, an Italian—a Roman soldier, not a Jew. Could he be a member of the church?” Some of the children responded, “Yes” and some said, “No.”

Then he pointed to the figure on the right and said, “This is an angel sent by Christ. He told Cornelius to ‘send your servants to Peter, and have them bring Peter to your house.’” Brent pointed to the second frame in which Cornelius commands two of his servants and one of his soldiers to bring Peter to his house.

Brent pointed to the third frame, next, and said, “Peter was hungry and as his meal was being prepared he had a vision. He saw a huge sheet coming down from heaven. The sheet was filled with animals that the Jews were not allowed to eat. There was a pig, a lobster, some shrimp and other shellfish, maybe even an alligator, a snake, a rabbit, and an eagle.” Then the children were told, “A voice commanded Peter to eat the animals, and Peter said, ‘but I have not in my entire life eaten an unclean animal!’” The children learned that then Cornelius’ servants came to the house in which he was staying. Brent asked the children, “What did Peter’s vision mean?” They didn’t know, and Brent said that Peter didn’t know either—that is until Cornelius’ servants arrived a few minutes after the dream. 

The teacher pointed to the fourth frame showing the meeting of Peter and Cornelius, and he explained, “Peter’s vision showed him that the gospel of Jesus Christ is for everyone. The good man Cornelius the Roman soldier could join Christ’s church!”

When asked what part of the story the children would like to draw, the three boys chose to draw the four-frame narrative, and three girls chose to collaboratively draw Peter’s vision. The teacher had sheets on which blank frames had been copied and a large sheet on which the girls chose to draw. Ian followed the narrative sequence very much as Brent had drawn it but drew each frame in his own way, not cropping the figures as the teacher had done. Jace redrew Brent’s narrative, showing the figures in close-up shots. Brent says, “I was pleased that Jace chose to follow my style (in the first two frames) because he usually drew stick figures.” Jace had not written any of the narrative, and Brent asked him if Brent could write the meaning of Peter’s vision in the last frame.

As the children drew, the class talked about the unclean animals—and the teacher kept emphasizing the symbolism of the unclean animals—that they were to tell Peter that any good person, Jew or Gentile could follow Christ. Brent joined the girls and drew an eagle, quite sure birds of prey were prohibited.

As the children drew, the bishop came into the classroom to give the children a treat. Brent invited the children to tell the bishop about their drawings and what they meant. When one of the girls pointed to a rabbit, the bishop said he thought Jews could eat rabbits.

When their drawings were finished, the children placed them in envelopes addressed to their families along with the accompanying scriptures that had been printed for each child. (The three girls’collaborative drawing of the vision was too large to photocopy so they included copies of Brent’s narrative in their envelopes. Each week the children in the class are encouraged to hand the envelopes to one of their parents as soon the class ends. Brent also suggests that the children ask their parents if they may help teach what they have learned during the week’s Come, Follow Me family study. 

[1] For the full study, Arts Education: In Public Elementary and Second Schools 1990-2000 and 2009-2010, see https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2012/2012014rev.pdf

[2] The National Core Arts Standards is a conceptual framework voluntarily adopted across the U.S. for Pre-K through high school for arts learning in the following disciplines: dance, media arts, music, theater, and visual arts. https://www.nationalartsstandards.org

[3] Teaching Drawing from Art, Brent Wilson, Al Hurwitz, and Marjorie Wilson (Worcester, Massachusetts: Davis Publications), 1987.

[4] Teaching Drawing from Art, p. 117.

[5] Teaching Drawing from Art, p. 122.