Children's Drawing and Writing: The Remarkable in the Unremarkable

ISBN-13: 9780415961554 / Angielski / Twarda / 2010 / 164 str.

Diane Mavers

Opis

Children's everyday drawing and writing are paradoxical: charmingly engaging, yet seemingly unremarkable in their ordinariness. This book takes a very close look at what passes by largely unnoticed at home and in school: copying, texts fleetingly present then gone, a picture drawn after the valued work of writing has been completed. Examining features of children's text making that are commonly disregarded because of their very ordinariness, or dismissed as mistakes because they are flawed or lacking, the book examines features such as shading, arrangement and forms of shorthand, and uncovers an intensity of effort in the making of meaning. In decisively shifting the focus away from insufficiency to what children can do and to the work' they invest in the texts they make, the lens taken here reveals resourcefulness and purposiveness. The unremarkable turns out to be remarkable. This has the most profound implications for what takes place at school, and beyond.

This book explores the variety of means by which children make meaning graphically in response to different social contexts. Mavers discusses children’s resourcefulness in their selection, shaping and combination of resources in paper-based and digital mediums and in educational and leisure-related contexts. The recognition that meanings are made with the resources of different modes opens up new possibilities for understanding representation and communication and raises questions about what the resources of different modes are and how they are interrelated. Building upon key concepts developed in recent empirical studies in and theorization of multimodality from a social semiotic perspective, this book offers ways of understanding children’s writing and drawing – both discretely and in combination – as design.

Spis treści

Preface
1: What counts as meaning?
2: Design
3: Writing as design
4: Drawing as design
5: Multimodal design
6: Redesign
7: Implications
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

O autorze

Diane Mavers is a Lecturer in Contemporary Literacy at the Institute of Education, University of London.