Katz – representation with “graphic languages”

One of the other really powerful lessons from Reggio Emilia, is that the children, very early, do drawing.  If you ask a two and a half year old, you give a two and half year old a pencil and paper and say, “Why don’t you draw whatever”, they will try it, but if you wait ‘til a child is five, most of them will say, “I can’t draw.”  You ask any adult, I ask you, or people around you to draw a building or the car, they’ll say “I can’t draw,” but when they’re very young, they don’t know they can’t draw.  Some draw better than others, that’s always going to be true, but what they do, and I found it very helpful as a lesson, is they don’t talk about art, they talk about representing.  What you’re looking at, what you remember, what you’re planning, and you represent it with what they call graphic languages, it can be pencil, it can be painting, it can be clay, it can be anything. 

So this act of representation also involves looking.  And I’ve worked with teachers who’ve been trying this and it’s so interesting they say, the children say, “Yeah I’m drawing this, but, what’s that bit? What is it called?  Why is it there? Who made it? Where did it come from?”  That’s what you want, that’s the intellectual content of the interaction between the children, and between the children and the adults in the classroom. 

And so my point was that the children are engaged extensively in examining, studying, asking questions about things that are going on around them, that are real.  And using what they call the graphic languages, drawing, painting, and various other sort of languages to record their observations.  They certainly argued with each other about what they’d seen, or what they’d done. They, there’s one, I have some pictures of a big mural the kids made of small drawings of bird feathers.  They’d gone to a local museum and they’d shown the kids how, what, bird feathers are very complex, I’d never thought about it, but they have all kinds of shapes and sizes, but that’s, you know, one of my main, sort of causes, is get the children involved in examining, closely, things in their environment.  When they get older, they should examine other peoples’ environments.  Historically way back, geographically far away, but the young ones, there’s so much to see in their environment.