Primary school teachers' and children's perceptions of the value of teacher-directed drawing(s) for learning in children's written work across the curriculum

This is an interpretative sociocultural semiotic study investigating teachers’ and children’s perception of the value of teacher-directed drawing across the curriculum, for knowledge, creativity and agency. Four children, aged 7-8, in an English primary school, and two of their teachers, participated in the layered embedded multiple case study (Yin, 2003). The data sources were drawings gathered from individual lessons in four different subjects and composite collaborative text ensembles generated by the teachers and children. Drawing has potential benefits for children’s learning as construction of knowledge, through the development and exercise of creativity and agency across the curriculum, as advocated by art education practitioners and research in early years and STEM education suggests, but there is little research focused on teacher-directed drawing or drawing across the curriculum, or inquiry into the perspective teachers and children on the value of these. Aligned to the focus of the inquiry, a visual methodology was employed, recognising that the data and the thesis itself also rely on graphic representation and are visual/textual constructions. The data were analysed as multimodal layered artefacts by combining a visual analysis of the drawings as images (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2021) with reflective thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2022) of the verbal data. The findings demonstrated that teachers and children value drawing but there are ambiguities and inconsistencies in their explanations of this. These raise epistemological questions about what children know and understand from making the drawings when the process and product is highly controlled. A further outcome is that drawing as an agentic and creative mode of meaning-making, is often constrained by, and reinforces, verbo-centric social values and normative literacy practices.