Contents:
In the past, it was feasible to teach the visual arts apart from literacy. It is no longer feasible for several reasons:
It is increasingly clear that teachers-across grade and content-must address literacy skills. Students always did require training in writing, reading and thinking. Now, even more of that training must occur in the classroom. Beyond providing specific bodies of information, this training is what schools are for. Literacy training becomes increasingly important in a technological society which places such a premium on these skills.
Drawing/Writing is a literacy strategy in which training in visual literacy precedes, by a heart beat, training in verbal literacy. Drawing/Writing has a fifteen-year proven track record for increasing levels of attention, commitment, self-direction and class cohesiveness as well as literacy skills in a broad range of students. Drawing/Writing meets the needs of under-funded, over-populated classrooms where the major characteristic shared by students is diversity— most especially in connection with the English language. Because Drawing/Writing includes an evaluation tool called Rescore, Drawing/Writing presents an abundance of data-quantitative, qualitative and anecdotal-useful to educational research. Drawing/Writing scores can be compared with standardized test scores to measure the effectiveness of this literacy program— not only on reading and writing skills, but on mathematical and science attitudes and aptitude, on learning disabilities, on ESL and TOEFL education, on foreign language education, on gifted education, and on the cognitive gains of homeschoolers who incorporate the Drawing/Writing method.
What does Drawing/Writing look like? What are some of the compelling reasons from child psychology, educational theory and practice, art history, the history of writing, and neurobiology for connecting drawing with writing? How does a Neuroconstructivist approach change teachers, students and classrooms? How does the new literacy work?
Gains in one area of endeavor, like drawing—a universal, easily developable skill—can be used to achieve gains in other areas of endeavor-like writing and reading. Small changes have big effects. This is a message of hope.
I happen to like the line drawings of very small children, better, in fact, than the work of anyone except masters. The closest thing to it, when children use pencils (colored or not), is the quill strokes of Rembrandt, the more spontaneous and less “spelled out” drawings by Picasso for Guernica, and a few stick drawings on paper by Pollock. If one assumes that a baby is born wholly integrated with its feelings and that separation from them is the result of intruding outside forces, for an adult to reintegrate himself with an equivalent lack of division and alienation in his expression is so rare that we call it, as well we might, “genius.”
The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell
The Drawing/Writing program is leisurely and cumulative; it moves from the visual to the verbal, from the simple to the complex, and from the concrete to the abstract, modeling the development of intelligent thought.
1.1 What Drawing/Writing Looks Like
A fifteen-year-old student from Thailand, Kanop Changtrakul, embarked on the Drawing/Writing program. He started with tentative English skills and minimal drawing skills, choosing to draw a cow horn. This is one of the most difficult objects to work with because of its subtle curves and bland colors. As he drew this object, Kanop gained confidence. After several attempts, Kanop wrote three versions of the following poem. I include the version Kanop thought was best, the third one:
Kanop Changtrakul’s Preliminary Smooth and no shape
Drawingand Writing, ninth grade,
Eaglebrook School,1987
But curved and twisted.
The shape is beauty.
The top is sharp.
The form is strong.
The color was white,
Now it’s lined in brown.
Inside, dead body, cobweb’s owner.
Strong gets weak
Beauty doesn’t stay forever
It doesn’t stay with any thing forever.
Kanop now has his B.A. in Psychology from Boston University and will pursue his Masters in Psychology. At B.U. he studied English literature.
Another ninth-grade English student, Lawrence Chen from Taiwan, produced the following drawings and writings about a conch shell. Lawrence’s balanced visual and verbal capabilities are clear, even if we cannot read Chinese. The preliminary drawing and the writing show elegance, fluency and skill. After translating this work into prose in English, Lawrence wrote this poem:
Lawrence Chen’s Preliminary Drawing and Lawrence Chen’s fishermen illustration showing
Writing, ninth grade, Eaglebrook School, 1987
The sea ever is my house.
The sand ever is my sleeping bed.
In the sea, the fish and the sea anemone are my friends.
The short seas and the rough sea made the noise [and] are my best music;
In the morning, I was on the beach taking a sun bath,
The people come to swim, the sea bird is flying
around me;
Some shell collectors find me-
Now, I’m in the English classroom.
Grains of stone are my bed.
No friends and no wonderful music.
he shell in the lower right hand corner,
ninth grade, Eaglebrook School, 1987
Lawrence’s English skills were more advanced than Kanop’s; his aloneness was no less.
Lawrence received his B.A. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Rochester. Having worked for an international consulting firm, Lawrence is starting a three-year degree in business in Japan. Recently, he wrote, “You are my favorite teacher. I remember and admire the energy, passion and creativity you put into the class. You inspired me to write my first English essay which was quite a ‘mission impossible’ at that time. I remember that I had to spend all night flipping through the dictionary. I did it because you were so nice to me and I didn’t want to let you down. I had a very good time in your class plus I got to draw stuff. Actually, I am still drawing ‘stuff,’ and I am into photography and Chinese painting, but am mostly sketching with a pencil” (February 27, 1997, Taipei, Taiwan)
1.2 What is a Drawing/Writing Teacher?
As a teacher, you may ask:
Art teachers may be dubious about their skills as teachers of writing. English teachers and other language teachers may be dubious about their drawing skills. The reader who intends to learn Drawing/Writing independently may be concerned about both. Drawing is a method for creating intelligible order. It is a universal language, and a natural one. Children draw on their own. Writing—as recorded speech—is another system for creating intelligible order. It must be learned.
The relationship of visual learning to verbal learning becomes reciprocal almost immediately. We see and we speak; we draw and read picture books. Then, we learn to write and read text. To eliminate or undervalue the visual aspects of the combined visual/verbal language acquisition process interrupts the dynamic, cutting its power in half. Drawing returns visual learning to the language acquisition process. Pictures speak to us.
Drawing is more than a resource for artists, designers, scientists and engineers. Drawing is a complex sensorimotor action requiring the selection, organization and communication of visual material. Drawing establishes a relationship between us and the world, providing us not only with content but with concrete evidence of the quality and characteristics of the relationship between us and the world. Our drawings show us not only what we see but how we see. The more accurately we draw, the more clearly we see, and the more we know. The more expressively we draw, the more persuasively we communicate. To paraphrase the Zen artist/writer Frederick Franck, drawing is the means by which we discover and rediscover the world (1973).
A visual approach to literacy in which the teacher fully participates allows teachers to share the frustrations and successes students experience. Joining students in the learning experience puts a different light on the enterprise: learning becomes a shared venture characterized by mutual respect. Drawing/Writing teachers do not demonstrate exercises and then stand apart as observers. They complete every step with their students, working on their language skills, too.
Joanne Quail, a second grade teacher at Applewild School, Fitchburg, MA, taught Drawing/Writing in January 1997. Her work and that of her students illuminate this book. Joanne wrote about her culminating drawing in the five-step series—the Composite Abstraction—in this way: “Sometimes shapes hold together and are tightly banded and defend each other with the force. Sometimes the shapes lie near each other and vibrate with energy to each other making the empty space between the shapes very powerful. Other times, shapes are alone moving over or interacting with other shapes but keeping their own identity and oneness. Then, too, a line need not form or enclose or intersect but is on its own. It belongs to the whole but it is somehow free of form. Still a force is released, onto others, and other forms send vibrations out to the line where time has been taken to add depth and value to a space [where] it seems to have more stability within itself. The other shapes and lines are nearby but the influence of dynamics is less.”
Eloquent, abstract, speculative writing often occurs at the end of the Drawing/Writing program.
1.3 A Cross-modal Strategy Defined
The brain has two hemispheres; they work together. A term to describe this integrated process is cross-modal. A cross-modal teaching strategy describes a dual process in which a deliberate transfer of information is achieved—from one mode of representation to another. Meaning occurs at the very confluence of the two modes and transformation is part of the process. The purpose behind the transfer is inter-influence: each mode of representation enhances and extends the other. For instance, in Drawing/Writing, a deliberate transfer of information is achieved from drawing to writing through the sentence, “My drawing tells me that my object is...because....” The explanatory words become part of the new expression. The work now includes image and text. The similes and metaphors routinely produced with each Drawing/Writing step as well as additional exercises with analogy, speculation, prediction and hypothesis train the bihemispheric brain to produce left/right, or verbal/visual messages where the combined information is what counts—not text, not image alone. By the end of the five-step program, students agree that the drawing and writing they have produced, particularly in connection with the Composite Abstraction, could not have been achieved in any other way. The mutual influence established by Drawing/Writing is critical to the richness of the explanations, whether these explanations are visual or verbal.
Cross-modal creations abound. For instance, a cartoon is a cross-modal, image/text production. What varies is the degree to which a transfer of information is deliberately constructed between image and text. In the cartoon, the illustration and the text go hand in hand, and the image interprets the text or vice versa. The cartoonist probably did not spend hours drawing, then write the text from the image, nor spend hours extracting every verbal nuance from the text, translating that visually. In William Blake’s illustrations of his poetry, the level of intent to translate between the two systems of representation is very high. The Drawing/Writing program structures a series of exchanges between drawing and writing with similar strong intent. The result is a different kind of drawing and a different kind of writing. In Drawing/Writing, each form of expression is deliberately informed by and directed by the other.
The slash between the words Drawing/Writing signals the following:
1.4 A Sketch of the Drawing/Writing Program
A cross-modal, visual/verbal procedure for conducting an information search: a grammar for intelligent thought, or the Form of the form
The goal of the Drawing/Writing program is training the brain to conduct information searches efficiently. It is efficient to start with a simpler, more accessible task and then to move to a more difficult one. For this reason, five drawing exercises introduce a series of concrete search strategies working from outside to inside and from there to a consideration of the whole. Each drawing exercise is accompanied by exercises in reflective writing. The drawing steps provide training in observational, analytical and inferential visual thinking; the written exercises transfer this visual thinking into words. Drawing/Writing provides the following general strategy for acquiring and expressing information: work from the visual to the verbal, work from the specific to the general, work from the concrete to the abstract.
In the drawing exercises, the visual analysis begins with an outline drawing (Blind and Regular Contour drawings), and moves to internal form (Basic Shape drawings). Then, the drawings explore the ways in which light creates surface values and the illusion of three dimensions (Light-Medium-Dark drawing). By including details about texture as well as incidental surface markings, the next drawing becomes even more comprehensive and “realistic” (the “Perfect” Whole drawing). The culmination and heart of the visual analysis follows: by combining parts from the previous drawings, students produce an entirely new definition of the object—one which does not look like the object but which stands for it (the Composite Abstraction). This abstract drawing prepares the mind for other abstract symbol systems including writing, reading and mathematics. In Drawing/Writing, visual analyses precede and undergird verbal analyses, modeling cognitive development.
Because writing follows drawing in a program where drawing is initially targeted as the primary tool for gathering information, the organization of the five drawings set the conditions for the subsequent writing. The visual procedure for selecting, organizing and synthesizing information establishes a “grammar” for intelligent, communicable thought. Artists and writers routinely access and use this grammar. It can be practiced by any thinker who receives exposure to and training in visual strategies. A predisposition toward order is just that—a predisposition. The drive toward intelligible communication requires tools and practice. Drawing/Writing provides tools and practice.
Fully developed communications—visual or verbal, painting or poetry—exhibit parsimony, or restraint. Unless the brain is sick or damaged, its goal is theleast, not the most expenditure of energy, as is true at atomic levels. The brain wishes to work well, not hard. The Drawing/Writing strategy described as “neither too much nor too little,” encourages elegant communication. A parsimonious elegance describes all optimal mental processes—from neural networks to language. Efficient neural networks are—at once—as elaborate and as pruned as they need to be. Visual solutions in design, verbal solutions in poetry or mathematics include all necessary elements. Students can learn to streamline the circuitry in their brains by practicing restraint and discrimination. The Composite Abstraction requires both.
Drawing/Writing requires the following supplies: pencils, magic markers, legal-size paper, legal-size folders, push pins or thumb tacks, and a box of objects including shoes, bones, kitchen utensils, carpentry tools and gardening tools.
The integrated series of visual/verbal exercises is preceded by an informal pre-test called “Preliminary Drawing and Writing.” This sample provides benchmarks for measuring changes in drawing, writing and thinking skills over the course of the Drawing/Writing program.
Jennifer Welden, Preliminary Drawing and Writing
of an immersion heater, Continuing Education, Westfield State
In the preliminary sample Jennifer wrote, “This is an immersion heater. It is useful when traveling to heat up some water for tea. It reminds me of early spring trips to the Maine coast. My mother and I take one along and drink tea by the window at the inn where we stay. Early spring can be very damp and cold up there so a hot cup of tea while we watch the cold waves crashing on the rocks and look forward to returning in summer [unfinished sentence].”
Jennifer Welden, Closing Drawing and Writing of
a pair of scissors, Westfield State College, Continuing Education, 1996
In the closing sample Jennifer wrote, “This is a drawing of a pair of scissors that came out just about exactly to scale. I looked at it and thought it could have been bigger but than I laid the scissors down on the drawing and found that the drawing is the same size as the object. The drawing is an honest one—a simple representation of a simple object. The shadows of the object blend with the object a little too much. If it had been drawn larger, it may have been easier to delineate the object from the shadow that it casts.” Both drawings show sensitivity and accuracy. Memory guides the first piece of writing. An analysis of scale, value and differentiation drives the second.
Jennifer Welden, Blind Contour drawing
of the immersion heater, Westfield State College,
Continuing Education, 1996
Step 1 includes two warm-up exercises and two drawings. The warm-up exercises include gesturing or tracing the shape of the object in the air with the arm and hand, and tracing the object on paper. The two drawings are the Blind Contour drawing and the Regular Contour drawing. In each instance, the writing exercise is structured in the same way: students write, “My Blind Contour drawing tells me that my object is...because....” This format is repeated throughout the program.
Jennifer Welden, Euclidean and Fractal Basic Shape drawings of immersion heater, Westfield State College, Continuing Education, 1996
Step 2 includes three geometric drawings: Euclidean Basic Shapes, Fractal Basic Shapes, and Organic Basic Shapes. Students complete the sentence, “My Euclidean Basic Shape drawing tells me that my object is... because....” Students use the same sentence with the other Basic Shape drawings, as they will with all subsequent drawings. Fractal geometry is so important to current understanding about mind and the world that an appreciable section in Step 2, Basic Shapes, is devoted to it.
Jennifer Welden, LMD drawing of immersion heater,
Westfield State College, Continuing Education, 1996
Step 3 is a value drawing called Light-Medium-Dark, or LMD.
Jennifer Welden, “Perfect” Whole drawing of
immersion heater, Westfield State College, Continuing Education, 1996
Step 4 is a fully rendered drawing called the “Perfect Whole.”
Jennifer Welden, CA of the immersion heater,
Westfield State College, Continuing Education, 1996
Step 5 is a combined drawing called the Composite Abstraction.
The program is completed by an informal post-test called “Closing Drawing and Writing.” This sample provides new benchmarks for drawing, writing and thinking skills. The students themselves quantitatively and qualitatively assess the preliminary and the closing drawing and writing samples using a tool called Rescore. Rescore is found at the end of Part 2. It includes counting numbers of words and parts of speech, as well as reflecting upon the meaning of these numbers. In this manner, grammar is built into the Drawing/Writing process. To assess progress, students require procedures and tools. Letter or number grades never replace a personal understanding of strengths and weaknesses. Even if teacher assessments are accurate, self-assessments are better. Learning to see oneself clearly is necessary to growth and change.
Drawing/Writing takes certain “rules” or procedures for ordering information—what this book calls the grammar of intelligent thought—and makes these procedures overt, accessible and practicable. Drawing/Writing provides practice with:
Eric wrote, “My Perfect Whole drawing shows the flexibility of my hack (hacky-sack). At the lower left corner it’s pointed providing an imperfection. Easily I could have made a circle, but hacks are only like that in mid-flight or brand new. My object looks like a gigantic pea thrusting out of a pod.”
Bill wrote, “My CA tells me that the sealed ends of the object are dark, and the ends that are open are light. The shading indicates where the molecules are dense and where they are loosely connected.”
Tim Lis, another Westfield State Continuing Education student who provided other drawings for this book, wrote, “My second CA drawing is sparse. It has a lot of open space. Few of the bits are filled in. My drawing is chaotic, almost like an explosion. My drawing has a slight 3-dimensional quality to it, as if expanding outward from slightly off-center of the page. It seems balanced on an axis at that same point. My drawing is curved and jagged. My drawing is like an explosion at a coat-hanger factory because mangled bits of wire and wiry shapes seem to be flying about. My drawing is a time-line for those who exist on a non-linear dimensions because the same events can be seen occurring more than once with only an unseen singularity near the middle for a reference point as it pulls and stretches events towards it.”
Paul Gagnon wrote, “My LMD drawing is a ferry boat because it has a large front that opens to allow for the vehicles to enter and passengers to be onloaded and offloaded. This ferry is going to Block Island and leaves the port at Point Judith four times daily. The upper structure is the wheelhouse because it is raised up on top. I will ride my bicycle all day on the island and see all the sights.”
In the Drawing/Writing exercises, information starts with the physical description of a line, moving to descriptions of shapes, to value studies, to fully rendered realistic drawings, and then to abstractions. The verbal descriptions move from concrete analysis to simile, metaphor, analogy, speculation, prediction and hypothesis. The accumulated visual/verbal information leads the thinker to a wealth of associations.
The following second-grade writing samples are reproduced verbatim. (Invented spelling is discussed at the end of Part 1.) Nicholas wrote, “My drawing looks like a bote with a krasht top. It looks like a one weler.”
Chad wrote,”It looks like a scell roting it looks like a wead gie walking it looks like a bird head.”
Kate wrote, “ What I see in this object is flows with a blue senter. It kind of is jaged. My object is hade [hard].” If you look at her Closing Drawing and Writing, Kate’s extraordinary drawing skills become even clearer.
Keith wrote, “My ‘Perfect’ Whole drawing has lots of points and isicals shapes. it looks like a undersea place. It looks like a bird stachue. it looks like a rock climer climing it looks like grass growing on a hill. it looks like a under ground manchon. it looks like the workshop of Barbars Chrismas. a caterpiller climbing up a tree.”
Keith wrote, “My f.b.s. [fractal basic shape] looks like a dragons tail it looks like a spine and back it looks like an upside down catipler it looks like a seet.it looks like a dragons throan with spines on it.”
In 1978-80, as a teaching assistant in Basic Drawing and Design at the University of Massachusetts, I developed the five-step drawing strategy described in this book. I tried to teach drawing logically. For me this meant incrementally. Visual information could be built up, step by step. The drawing exercises started with the outside and worked in. Most of my students were non-art majors. They all wanted to become convincing realists. I knew that if I taught observation skills, my students would reach their goal. Once they reached it, I faced another realization: I could not leave my students stranded on the bright shores of realism. This conviction was responsible for the fifth step called the Composite Abstraction. The fifth step has become the power house of the program.
I designed writing steps to accompany the drawing steps, convinced that writing would allow students to construct a more extensive body of information and that this additional verbal information would encourage even more accurate drawing. Drawings carried information; how to access this information using writing? After experimenting for several years, I devised this sentence: “My Blind Contour drawing tells me that my object is...because....” The verb “tells” makes it clear that drawings carry accessible information, and the word “because” forced the writer to defend or explain the information.
Between the years 1980 and 1991, the five-step drawing program underwent a series of additions and refinements. Ease of use for other teachers and their students was imperative. If the program were not easy to use, it made no difference whether the Drawing/Writing approach worked for me and my students. I commenced clarifying and stream-lining the program.
Every student population has special needs. Every student is special. This being so, the program required flexibility. It had to appeal to students for whom writing and reading were troublesome as well as to students who found writing and reading easy. Research supported my own observations; dyslexic students often exhibited strong drawing skills. Convinced that a drawing-based literacy program would benefit dyslexic students, I approached a school for dyslexic students, proposing a pilot study for my doctorate. A one week session of Drawing/Writing improved students’ writing skills. They wrote more words and, in some cases, their handwriting became more flowing. Most showed improvements in both their drawing and writing skills in three days.
I documented cases where the initial drawing marks were dramatically more fluent than the same student’s initial writing marks. After the one-week program of Drawing/Writing, the dyslexic students demonstrated increased ease in their writing marks, producing more words and richer content, too. A few years later as an English teacher, I observed similar motoric and cognitive improvements in the handwriting of dyslexic and attention deficit students at the middle and high school levels.
The shell drawing and writing and the small vertebra drawing and writing show more labored writing marks. The lacrosse glove and large vertebra show a quantity of writing, but, in both cases, the writing (scanned at the same resolution as the drawing) is less consistent in pressure. In all four cases, the drawing marks reveal more fluidity and pressure than the writing marks. Still, the act of drawing changes the writing structurally—or grammatically—as well as motorically and aesthetically. The selection, evaluation and organization of visual information affects the selection, evaluation and organization of verbal information. These are startling and important results. Better drawing can bring about better writing—if the two activities are deliberately linked.
The first writing with the small vertebra follows: “this thing is boney and srage crved white, bran.” The second writing, “I think It stings. I hate to dral. rouf, poine, smoth, inwad, squirr, reclang, this big and cred, skomey” (David Rheuble, 1987).
The first writing with the shell: “It look’s like a cammle and a huorse. It is a sea shell too.” Second writing: “I dyskover the shell can be ennething you went it to be. The shell has a lot of armoys and it is bumpe too.” In both instances, an additional clause indicating the increased thoughtfulness of the writer is expressed grammatically, “I think”....“I dyskover” (Daniel Miller, 1987).
The writing about the lacrosse glove is lighter in pressure and less well-formed than the drawings of the lacrosse glove. On the other hand, this writing is complex, it moves from description to metaphor and speculation. First writing: “its a pwde for a game called lacros you dont bert or a brus. its soft has a plustic shel and the reoset paret its smothe it also rofe.” Second writing in response to the Basic Shape drawing: “B.S. looks like a robot hand or a sharp object it hole of difrant shapes to it its could be macanical the second is more corved.” LMD writing: “it gets darker as you go along it has a lot of derent valy” (Wally Shakun, 1987).
In one instance, that of the large vertebra, well-formed drawing and careful writing go together. Still, the drawing has far greater authority and panache. Preliminary drawing: “It looks like a spas ship that has been traveling for a log time. It is a peese of a cow’s bown.” Contour: “It has a lot of angels and is jagged in a lot of plases.” PW: “It has severl holes and craks all over the plas.” BS and LMD: “There are more shapes in this picher then the last picher. It looks like a mape for a mall. It only has a fow darck plases and a lot of open light pases” (Christian Morrison, 1987). The “there is” sentence introduces distance. The writer moves from observation to comparison and generalization.
I made these notes teaching Drawing/Writing to ADD and LD students: “R’s hand is more relaxed and I am not fooling. His drawing skills are good, he is able and powerful. J, who was a behavioral problem, is totally intent, quiet, involved, sitting still. Why? Why is drawing different? It must be different because these students are clearly good at drawing and clearly understand what they are doing. J. is so calm I cannot believe it. He is tracing the shoe—it seems to work wonderfully—he has seen the imprint of the toes” (1/15/87).
Encouraged by the improvements I observed motorically and cognitively in the writing skills of an identified dyslexic population of schoolboys, I wondered whether Drawing/Writing could improve reading skills. Because drawing trains the brain to decode information as well as to encode it, training in drawing must also be training in reading. It stood to reason that drawing could be used to develop writing and reading skills. My continuing work bears out this double hypothesis: training in drawing facilitates writing and reading. Research and experience with Drawing/Writing support these basic assumptions:
The challenge remained to create an easy-to-use program that connected the innate ability to draw with the innate predisposition to write. The five-step program met these requirements. To encourage oral language skills, including the ability to provide focused verbal analyses, I designed “Peer Share and Build” and “Group Critique.” If designed properly, peer sharing and group critiques would allowed several things to happen in the classroom:
In my seventeen years of teaching, the Drawing/Writing work of Tim Lis, along with that of Joanne Krawzyck, show the most balanced, developed visual and verbal skills I have encountered. Tim’s writing shows a great range in vocabulary. Tim came to the Continuing Education course with this vocabulary in place. Watch for the depth and logical precision of his writing and of Joanne’s as you enjoy other examples of their work throughout the book. Joanne’s work is featured in Step 4. In both of these cases, Drawing/Writing provided a vehicle for extending existing skills.
Tim wrote, “My PW drawing tells me my object is curvilinear because of all the rounded lines throughout the silhouette and the gradual curves of the light values. My drawn object is organic in structure because of its myriad abnormalities that follow jagged and curved lines indicative of natural, non-rigid formation. My drawn object is bulbous because it has a widened, rounded segment along the top. My drawn object has divots because its dark values indicate shadows like those cast along the walls of holes. My drawn object seems chaotic in structure along its left appendage because it has squiggley, unfinished lines with no sense of order in contrast with the sweeping smudges and more purposeful lines in the middle. My drawn object lacks symmetry because it does not have segments that match.”
As a Drawing/Writing teacher, I continue to observe the phenomena predicted by my doctorate. Drawing/Writing increases attention. It elevates emotion. It encourages logical thinking within the context of an expanded vocabulary. Theoretically, the Drawing/Writing program is powerful because it models brain processes. Empirically, it is powerful because students like it. The growth they experience and the work they produce is extraordinary.
I have used Drawing/Writing to teach middle school and high school writing courses, middle school English literature and art courses, high school interdisciplinary courses, and college art history and studio courses.
I first used Drawing/Writing as a middle school teacher in a boys’ school with a high percentage of foreign students. I taught English to culturally diverse eighth and ninth graders, including students from Thailand, Japan, Honduras, Mexico, the Arab Emirates, Spain, and China. My school year began with a two-week session of Drawing/Writing. To start, each student selected an object from a box of tools and bones, drew that object, and then wrote about it in his own language (e.g., Lawrence Chen’s work at the beginning of this chapter). Then the students showed their drawings to each other and read their writing aloud. It became clear, if it had not been so before, that students with fledgling English skills were literate in their own languages. Some were, in fact, tri-
lingual. It is easy to make incorrect assumptions about the literacy levels of those who do not speak, write or read our own language. Allowing students to write in their own languages, first, corrects these assumptions. American students also gain an appreciation for the aesthetic aspects of written languages like Chinese, Japanese and Arabic.
Drawing/Writing encouraged a tolerant, more relaxed atmosphere. Every student was able to draw, whatever his English language skills. The rest of the Drawing/Writing program continued in English. When I team-taught Spanish classes, Drawing/Writing was conducted in Spanish. Drawing/Writing can be used to build writing, reading and speaking skills in any language.
For instance, in a second-year Spanish class, Sam Sheridan wrote, “Está blanco y negro. Está a mismo de un avion nuevo. La debuja está maca. Está el mismo de un pezo. Está una cosa fuera del mundo. Yo pienso que el objectivo es de un gran animale.”
After students produced a preliminary piece of writing in their own language, I asked them to translate the writing into another language. The ESL students were required to translate theirs into English, producing a “pre-test” sample in English. English-speaking students were required to translate their writing in English into some other language, using foreign language dictionaries and grammar books or previous knowledge. These translation exercises sensitized native English speakers to the linguistic struggles their foreign classmates faced daily. These translation exercises encouraged useful social experiences, including empathy. The goal of every classroom, including the multicultural classroom, is the growth of the human mind and spirit in the context of language learning.
Through the years, a handful of disengaged students have come into my classrooms. Over and over again, I have seen the motivational wonders worked by drawing. Students make leaps in drawing skills and then they make gains in writing skills because they now care about what they are doing. Small, tentative pencil drawings are replaced by large, fully developed, high-contrast marker drawings. Sparse, disengaged writing becomes invested and rich. Rescore, the evaluation tool built into the Drawing/Writing program, often registers doubled or tripled word-use.
Changes become more subtle with successive Drawing/Writing sessions. Students may write less on the closing writing sample than on the first, but they write more precisely. One metaphor eliminates a paragraph. In a similar way, minimalist drawings signal a refinement, not a loss in drawing skills.
Football players have been among my successes. Most of them—like many of my students—take the art survey course as a core requirement. My highly interactive approach surprises them. The drawing component is an additional novelty. But there is more to it than that. Intellect and football correlate. Both require work. A football analogy is useful, too. The football player who runs for a ball thrown well ahead of him is like the avant-garde artist, reaching with all of his energy and skill to catch the drift of meaning. We all understand ideas better when they are defined in the context of our own experience.
Drawing lets college students reclaim an activity they left behind in childhood. By drawing a work of art, even from a photograph in a textbook, students learn about the work in ways looking alone cannot provide. Because Drawing/Writing requires writing, students who enter college increasingly ill-equipped to write gain additional practice.
It is becoming clear to teachers in disparate fields that drawing can be used to heal what my colleague Frances Jo Grossman of Georgia State University calls “wounded writing.” The committed act of drawing acts like needle and thread, stitching writing back onto students’ expressive lives.
1.6 Eight Educational Benefits
The Fifth Step, the Composite Abstraction (CA), invites students to engage in inventive symbolic play. The purpose of the Composite Abstraction is to facilitate:
To achieve these skills and sensibilities, the mind must be alert and strategic. The idea of using parts of former solutions to create a new solution challenges students’ inventiveness. As a personal, self-constructed symbol system that exists somewhere between drawing and writing, the CA readies students for understanding new symbol systems—like writing or mathematics.
The nickname for the CA is “the new hieroglyphics.” Egyptian hieroglyphics evolved from the pictorial to the phonetic; a picture of a vulture came to stand for the initial sound of the word “vulture.” In somewhat the same way, an optically accurate drawing changes its form in Drawing/Writing by becoming an abstraction, recapitulating the process of the invention of writing from drawing.
The eight educational benefits of the CA are:
(1) Each child learns a group of visual and verbal strategies, including the ability to examine, analyze, compare and contrast, evaluate, sequence, redefine, reorganize, balance, and integrate information. Drawing/Writing returns children to direct experience with the construction of symbolic language, allowing them to re-create, as mini-experiences, the history of drawing and writing. Students are invited to regress to the beginning of recorded time, constructing a hands-on understanding of the development of symbolic language as drawing. Finding drawing natural and easy, children are freed to devise text experimentally, in bits and pieces, around their drawings. Drawing/Writing teaches students what it feels like to create pictographs, logograms, and phonograms, as well as the written word.
(2) Students who have completed a series of composite abstractions know how to create abstractions. They know they can make marks that do not look like an object but which describe it in new ways. They understand a very powerful idea: symbolic representation. The very young student who practices CA’s is ready to believe that the abstract drawings he has created are like writing. If his CA carries meaning, writing will carry meaning. It is at this point that the child can be introduced to the idea that mathematical notation—whether arithmetic, algebra or calculus—or, for that matter, musical notation, will be meaningful, just as abstract paintings will be meaningful.
The gulf between symbol systems is not as wide as we imagine. Children can draw their way toward mathematical operations.
(3) Students who are not ready to write or read can create a series of meaningful Composite Abstractions, gaining an educational grace period in the language acquisition process. Because of differences in experiences as well as maturational rates, brains differ. Allowances must be made for differences. Some brains are ready to read in the first grade. Some make the breakthrough later.
On the other hand, children are born ready for symbol systems. Every representation children construct in their brains is an abstraction. Serious play with abstraction need not be withheld until a certain time or grade. Children demonstrate their readiness for meaning- making through spontaneous scribbling and drawing. Serious work with abstract symbols can be achieved through the CA before children are able to write or read. This work is not only preparatory. It is legitimate work in and of itself. The ability to make and use visual symbols is as important as being able to make and use verbal symbols, and a lifetime of confidence in verbal symbols may—for some children—depend upon it.
Joshua Lucas wrote, “My CA tells me that it looks like the sun. It looks like a egg. It looks like a bote.”
Courtney Bergeron wrote, “My CA tells me mase, stret. Like a skate bord, a srkle.”
A grace period for writing and reading is important for developmentally delayed children as well as for children at risk for language-related learning disabilities. The child who practices Composite Abstractions is more likely to accept the fact that marks like words or mathematical notations that mean nothing right now will mean something in the future. For this transfer to happen, teachers must make clear that the CA is an abstract symbol like letters, words, and numbers. CA’s drawn by other students are initially unintelligible until they are explained in group critiques. Students who construct and discuss Composite Abstractions know they can work with abstract symbols. These students may be less likely to adopt defeatist attitudes or mental blocks toward other abstract symbols systems like writing or mathematics, thereby avoiding “acquired” learning disabilities. Knowing their abstract drawings are important and intelligible, late-blooming readers sustain their natural exuberance and confidence as learners. If drawing is presented as a substantive mental activity in a literacy program, reassurance is also provided for anxious and embarrassed adult learners who have not yet learned to read or write.
Because of the brain’s neural modifiability, Drawing/Writing—if it is implemented from pre-kindergarten on—may allow students who are at risk for learning disabilities to self-remediate before the onset of actual troubles with writing and reading. If a brain frames the act of writing the way it frames abstract drawing, that brain may be able to use its “drawing areas” to write and read. The drawing area of the brain may extend its neural influence into a less functional language area, reorganizing it for success the way the right hemisphere reorganizes or replaces language function following damage to the left hemisphere.
Beyond the recognized potential of the brain for self-healing, there is this to consider: what the brain thinks is going on is going on for that brain. The Drawing/Writing student who believes that writing and reading are more advanced forms of abstract drawing knows she will learn to write and read. If she can make meaning using drawings, she will be able to make meaning using letters and words. The CA allows the student to develop her symbolic skills at her own pace, while gaining confidence in the ability of abstract symbols to make meaning. Because the Drawing/Writing program is self-regulatory, all students have a chance to become literate.
The optically accurate fourth step in Drawing/Writing requires an exercise in abstraction. An optically accurate drawing is just another simulacrum. As convincing as it may be, it remains a partial representation; it is not the actual thing it depicts. It is a certain kind of drawing, no more or less real than a line or a dot on a page. By the same token, the abstract drawing, the CA, is no less descriptive than the optically accurate drawing.
Still, even to the student who created it, the CA is, to some degree, unintelligible as content at first. As balanced as it may be formally, the CA as narrative or content can only be understood inferentially. The student must scan the drawing for cues to meaning, constructing some written comment about them.
If the brain can construct a potentially infinite string of well-formed sentences from hearing spoken sentences (Chomsky, 1973), the brain is equipped for inference. Whether meaning-making strategies are called deep grammar or templates or schemata or innate predispositions or space phase sandwiches or the Form of the form (all of these terms will be covered), the brain is organized to extract and construct meaning. To extract meaning from minimal cues, the brain must be alert, it must be equipped with search strategies, and it must have a procedure for combining information in meaningful ways. Drawing/Writing provides a procedure for honing attention, for conducting informational searches, and for constructing meaning from minimal cues through drawing and writing.
(4) Students who receive training in the CA learn recombinant strategies.2 Whether overt or covert, creativity is a system. Through the CA, Drawing/Writing teaches students one such system: how to construct a new whole out of old parts.
(5) Students trained in CA #1 and CA #2 learn to refine, re-evaluate, and redesign their inventions. “Going back to the drawing boards” is part of the process. The writing associated with several successive CA’s undergoes similar revisions.
(6) Students practicing CA’s are introduced to a powerful concept described as “right relationships.” Right relationships exist in art when the formal elements of line, form, space and color are balanced in a harmonious whole. Aesthetic decision-making is often intuitive; still, aesthetic decisions can be discussed.
In group critiques there is usually agreement about what constitutes too much or too little in a drawing. Consensus about right relationships has implications for the relevance of art education to other levels of decision-making. The concept of right relationships in drawing is easily extended to include discussions about right relationships in human behavior. An ap-proach to ethical behavior based on aesthetics becomes a possibility.
(7) Students who practice CA’s learn another powerful idea: acceptable differences. When students learn to accept other students’ initially unintelligible CA’s, they’re on their way to understanding this concept. By seeing that there are many possible ways to draw a composite abstraction, even very young students learn flexibility. Experience with a range of drawing solutions prepares the mind to expect a range of solutions to any problem whether it is artistic, social or political. Rather than balking at new ideas, students learn to welcome them.
Training in the production of diverse solutions can be expanded through teacher-generated discussions to include tolerant and compassionate attitudes toward people, places, ideas, and customs. An arts-based approach to ethics, or right action, is especially compatible with classrooms where the one constant is diversity. A congenial classroom is one in which learning occurs. One of the hallmarks of a congenial learning environment is the expectation and acceptance of difference—in fact, taking pleasure in things just because they are different. The CA allows the teacher, the parent, and the child to understand that the “mind’s best work” is different for every child. Not only will one child’s best work vary from every other child’s best work, but that individual child’s best work will show itself in various ways, at various times. The importance of training young minds for variability cannot be overstated. Learning to accept what delights the mind makes literacy education pleasurable and useful.
(8) Group critiques teach students to speak precisely and critically. Gentle but relentless prodding by the teacher forces students to clarify vague or ambiguous statements. Eventually, the entire group becomes skilled in constructive criticism.
Visual and verbal codes are changing fast. New word processing programs, graphics programs and computer languages abound. Students need to learn to break codes. They need to be adept at new systems. Students who grow up with computers learn intuitive, exploratory behavior. Students who do not grow up with computers need to practice exploratory, code-cracking behavior, too.
In the context of this book and Drawing/Writing, reading first occurs when students create drawings they understand. Breaking the code starts with drawing and progresses to other symbol systems.
The Composite Abstraction prepares the mind to read what it cannot yet read. The CA allows the mind that is reading uneasily to read more easily through practice with abstract symbols. Drawing/Writing students at the “CA stage” literally “get the picture.” Having broken the code of visual language, they know they can decode others.
1.7 The Evaluation Tool Rescore
After completing the Composite Abstraction, students choose a new object to draw and write about in a loosely timed, informal “post-test.” The new object rekindles interest, challenging students’ new skills. The student has learned how to extract information from one object and to express that information visually and verbally. The degree to which those skills transfer to a new object measures the effectiveness of the five-step program. Like the Preliminary Drawing and Writing, the Closing Drawing and Writing is a timed exercise. Then, students evaluate quantitative and qualitative changes in their drawing and writing skills using a scoring tool called Rescore. The two sets of drawing and writing samples function as pre-test and post-test. Because the word “test” may provoke anxiety and inauthentic behavior, the words “pre-test” and “post-test” are not used. The terms “Preliminary Drawing and Writing” and “Closing Drawing and Writing” are clear and nonthreatening.
Students learn to identify changes in their writing quantitatively first, and qualitatively second: first, the numbers; then, what the numbers mean. Students look for a change—say, in the number of adjectives in the writing—and then evaluate that change. What do more adjectives mean? A student who uses more adjectives might conclude that his writing is becoming more descriptive. A student who records fewer words may conclude that her writing is tighter, or more poetic. Elegant mathematical solutions are parsimonious. So is good writing.
To identify specific changes in her writing, a student must learn the parts of speech. To be able to use Rescore beyond the counting level requires an understanding of grammar.
The Rescore program provides a personal approach to grammar, introducing it in the context of students’ writing. Students count not only the total number of words, but parts of speech, for instance, verbs. To use Rescore, students must understand what a verb is. A preliminary piece of writing may contain 40 words, and the closing writing may contain 60 words. Students may count 8 verbs in the preliminary writing, and 14 verbs in the closing writing. If students note an increase in active verbs, they may conclude their work is more forceful, less passive. Learning to distinguish between active and passive verbs allows students to fine-tune their use of language, moving them beyond content to a knowledgeable interest in the structure of their writing.
Michael Cooper, Preliminary Drawing and Michael Cooper, Closing Drawing and Writing,
Writing, corkscrew, Westfield State College,
Continuing Education, 1996
cow horn, Westfield State College, Continuing Education, 1996
Michael Cooper wrote in his Preliminary Drawing and Writing about the corkscrew, “I wish I could give more on how it really is through my eyes. Not similar but good. If or when things progress, I might be more strong about my work. I think my ideas are good but my skills lack.”
In his Closing Drawing and Writing, Michael wrote, “I don’t know what to think? Closing that means the end, it is all over. My drawing is shaped like this because at first it started small at a point and grew. It is curved up and down. Like this class good times and overwhelming feelings at others. I see Euclidean shapes and beyond. I could use this horn and blow a loud earth shattering sound to let the world hear the new sounds of my poetic tongue. Tough and learned through time, class, life and man’s evolution.”
Michael’s Rescore shows that his word use went from 16 to 88; from 0 to 1 each for simile, prediction and hypothesis. Michael wrote, “I really felt more comfortable [with writing] and just let it all flow.” He commented that his style is “poetic and more powerful.” He felt that drawing helped him to express himself “in different ways” in writing and that his writing was “less scattered.” He felt “more pleasure” drawing, and became aware of “a lot of negative space. dumb.” In terms of his style in drawing, Michael wrote, “My overall style is more realistic and more expressive.”
Drawing/Writing students recognize the relationship between structure and language through a knowledge of grammar and punctuation. Because grammar and punctuation provide tools for identifying changes in language use, Rescore provides a huge incentive to learn grammar and punctuation.
To write well, students must enjoy writing. Writing is a terrific amount of work, much more work, for instance, than painting. Spelling rules, punctuation and grammar rules taught as preconditions to good writing may discourage the early natural enthusiasm for this activity. Once writing takes root, rules of grammar and punctuation may be offered for consideration.3 Ask young writers whether punctuation is necessary or not. Ask them to try reading their work aloud without it. Punctuation allows breathing if nothing else. As practitioners of writing, students are ready to care about commas and semicolons, adverbs and conjunctions.
We use a visual/spatial system to locate our bodies in space and to move around in the world. This earlier organizing system, or “grammar,” this proprioception, undergirds the grammar of language. A visual/spatial grammar informs the natural act of drawing while providing a basis for the acquired activities of writing and reading. It is in this sense that this book accepts an innate grammar as the predisposition to order. “Grammar” as the names of the parts of speech must be learned.
The predisposition to drawing is innate. Children do not need to look at other drawings to draw. All they need is something to draw with and something to draw on. The predisposition to write and read is innate, too, but we need to look at books, be read to, and talked to, and see people around us writing and reading to learn how to read and write.
Drawing happens naturally. Writing and reading must be learned. No one has to teach children to scribble. The alphabet and some rudimentary ideas about spelling must be learned before children can crack the language code. At this point in educational history, children’s predisposition toward writing needs a boost. Training in drawing—a natural and accessible skill for all children—encourages children to write as part of a lifelong process.
Nate wrote, “My blin cerve mintins crevisis.sterat [My blind curve mountains crevices. straight].”
The Rescore grading sheet provides a personal approach to grading rather than an imposed approach. Students who get “A’s” from teachers do not necessarily believe they are “A” students. On the other hand, many students howl in indignation over grades incommensurate with their estimation of their abilities. They equate time spent with the quality of the work. They lack an understanding that grades reflect product, not process. Both process and product have value. At this point in educational history, process is as valuable as product, if not more so. Students who use Rescore focus their energies first on product, and then on process. A second-year Spanish student produced these Rescore results and accompanying evaluation:
“Mi dibujo es un insecto con muchas piernas. Mi dibujo es como la cabeza de un perro. Mi dibujo es miedo porque él es una mano terrible de un gigante. Es como la mano de un lagarto. Yo puedo usar mi dibujo para guardar mis manos. Mi dibujo es una víbora porque tiene los dientes de un víbora. Mi dibujo es sencillo porque es una herramienta de lacrosse. Mi dibujo es corto y fuerte.”
When asked to reflect on how his writing in Spanish had changed after a session with Drawing/Writing, Sam wrote, “Miro un cambio grande, porque veo más palabras interesantes y realisticas. Miro un cambio de la calidad de mi escritura, porque ahora puedo espresar mis emocionentes.” Gains in numbers of words, in the quality of the words, and in the expressiveness or emotional content of the words are common in Drawing/Writing. From his pre- to his post-test, Sam’s word count went from 26 words to 73 words; from 4 adjectives to 12 adjectives, from one metaphor to 4 metaphors. It is not necessary to run a statistical analysis to evaluate changes like these.
Peter Chu, another student in that second year Spanish class, also produced Preliminary and Closing drawing and writing samples of interest.
Peter wrote, “Un mitod de patín—Cuando empezo, yo tengo un dificil tiempo. No me gusta esto projeto porque le patinar es un objeto malo debujar.”
Peter wrote, “Mi dibujo es como un tiburón. Mi dibujo es un herramienta de romper nueces. Mi dibujo es muy interessante porque los aspectos son muy complicados. Por ejemplo, mi dibujo tiene los aspectos que aprendimos durante esto projecto. Ahora, me gusta esto projeto porque mis dibujos son más hermosos. Yo soy feliz. Aprendo mucho y yo sugero esto projeto para los estudiantes de todas las clases en el futuro. Ahora yo soy cansado y no hago escribo más. Yo creo que mi opinión está obvioso. Durante la projeto, yo aprendo muchas palabras nuevas también. Gracias Señor Taylor porque yo tiene muy divertido.”
Peter Chu’s Rescore, Deerfield Academy, 1991
Peter Chu’s Preliminary Writing had a total of 32 words; his Closing Writing had 90 words. From no similes, metaphors, predictions or hypotheses, Peter wrote one of each in the second writing sample. As Peter observed, “Mi vi un cambio grande porque ahora uso más similes, metáforas, y major adjetivos. Ahora mis escrituras son más comprendidas. Mi vi un cambio de números complemente tieno más calidad.”
It is hard for students to argue with their own documentation of process and product, even if the results of both sets of evaluations do not match their perceptions of the quality and quantity of their work. Students cannot evaluate what they have not produced.
Rescore is an invaluable constructivist tool for parents and teachers, too. Parents receive an assessment of their child’s reading, writing and thinking skills provided by the child. The detail and depth of the Rescore self-evaluation is impressive and reassuring to parents. Their child knows where she stands as a visual and verbal thinker. Because parents have received a letter from the teachers who include Drawing/Writing as a strategy, they appreciate that training in drawing is also training in visual literacy, allowing parents to look at drawings as evidence of growth. In fact, it is often easier to see a child’s growth in terms of drawing than writing.
Teachers also need to know how their students’ skills are growing. Students formally share their portfolios with the teacher, going over each piece of work. Using a check-list, they demonstrate the degree to which the portfolio is complete.4 Together, students and teacher discuss the work as product and as process. For many teachers, it will seem strange to receive students’ assessment of work instead of providing that assessment. Although Rescore displaces the teacher as portfolio grader, it does not remove the teacher from the evaluation process. Teachers may choose to include other criteria in a final grade like attendance, group critique participation, or work in other content areas.
Joanne Quail, teacher of second graders, provides this advice to prospective Drawing/Writing teachers: “You have to relax with this. My students loved the Euclidean drawings. There was not a sound in the room. I could have left the room and gone home. Students who move around all of the time were as still as rocks.” Joanne adds, “Some students were locked when it came to similes. It was clear that they wanted to express themselves freely. Fear is the component. This block exists in kids. First-born children especially have so many rules. They can’t float into new spaces easily.” Joanne added this comment about “locked” children and Drawing/Writing: “I learned more from what did not come out [in their work]. I learned to be more sensitive to freeing them in their expression. It [Drawing/Writing’s emphasis on simile and metaphor] is as freeing for the teacher as it is for
the kids.”
Holly C. Tuttle, twenty-five year veteran art teacher, Central High School in Springfield, MA, writes via e-mail, “I sent some Drawing/Writing monoprints to the MAEA convention. The writing is absolutely outstanding” (October 10, 1997).
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Please e-mail your questions or comments for Dr. Sheridan ssheridan@drawingwriting.com |
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