This is the drawing I produced with my nephew and niece

Reflection 3 Beach experiences

 Beach experience in Melbourne

Childhood experience at a Cambodian beach

This drawing was produced by the researcher and her nephew and niece (two international university students).

There was a discussion about oversea students’ lives in Australia before our collaborative drawing. When the topic of conversation came to favorite activities in Melbourne, they mentioned that they liked to go to the beach in Melbourne. Then, they started to draw what they have experienced at the beach. After that, their drawing reminded them of their childhood experiences at the beach in Cambodia. They continued to draw their childhood experiences at the beach.

Reflections:

Perception: The collaborative drawing enabled them to share their experiences and perceptions of their overseas life in Australia. The picture of a Melbourne beach expresses a peaceful and relaxed social world. People on the beach are relaxing, surfing, and walking. The collaborative drawing conceptualized their overseas life as being free and independent. The coffee bar is the only food service near the beach.

Comparing to their childhood experience at a Cambodian beach, the Cambodian experience was enjoyable and children could engage in many water activities with other children on the beach. The activities indicate children’s engagement with play objects. Also, there was more marketing at the beach, and the seafood was very nice. This shows two different lifestyles in Melbourne and Cambodia.

Communication: The drawings show the diverse cultures of the two countries, and cultural differences are shown through the shared thinking and drawing. How the international students valued their life overseas has been visualized. The drawings acquired knowledge of diversity.

Invention: They drew their childhood beach experience and compared it to their current beach life. Now, they are concerned about security in Cambodia. Their parents don't allow them to play freely at the beach now, and they have to stay in a hotel every time they go to the beach. Their parents are concerned about safety on the beach as they are richer than before. The researcher’s niece mentioned, “We are not allowed to go to the beach as it is not safe. We are rich now.” This is the reason why they preferred to draw their childhood beach experience. The drawing shows their ideal beach in Cambodia. They felt that they did not have a lot of freedom in their home country compared to Australia.

Action: The drawing crystallized the shared thinking and supported a deep understanding of world differences and lifestyle differences among people in different cultural contexts.

The collaborative drawing, as an innovative research method, allows the researcher access to the participants’ perceptions and knowledge of the social world in a richer way. The picture helps the researcher and participants to be aware of the world and the transformation of knowledge past to present. The drawing process can be considered as a mirror of international students’ personal identities and supporting self-reflection. The drawing captures the complexity and layers of meaning on one page. Also, the expressive form of drawing offers the researcher access to visual representations of emotions, perceptions, and even abstract ideas. 

Hi Avis here...hello

Hi,
I'm Avis Ridgway, lecturer in early childhood and primary education from Monash University. My PhD was about developing methodological tools for understanding historical development in early childhood. Visual methodology and documentation are fascinations for me.

I work with Liang Li and we are sharing our ideas about drawing as a methodological tool for understanding more about young children and ourselves as researchers in collaboration.
This week we are reading each other's reflections on selected drawings from our sketchbook and then commenting from our own perspectives as well.
We will soon share our reflections on this blog site.
Cheers to all, and happy drawing...
Avis

literature references and resources

Hi everyone

This may be a useful bibliography to help you find papers that focus on arts based education research, drawing as research, collaborative drawing, critical literacies, journals as research etc.

My intention here is to provide an initial list that you can add to as time goes on. The best way to do that is just to share your readings via posting a comment to this post. If you have hyperlinks to papers etc, these can also be embedded in your comments. otherwise I'm sure most of these can be found easily in your respective Uni library catalogues.

So I've listed them in APA style. I realise we could use Endnote, but I'm not sure on how to share a single Endnote file across different computers.

Adams, J. (2008) The pedagogy of the image text: Nakazawa, Sebald and Spiegelman recount social traumas. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 29(1), 35-49

Atkinson, D. (2001) Teachers, students and drawings: Extending discourses of visuality. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 22(1), 67-79

Barone, T. & Eisner, E. (2012) Arts Based Research. Los Angeles: Sage

Barone, T. (2001) Science, art and the predispositions of educational researchers. Educational Researcher, 30(24), 24-28

Butler-Kisber, L. (2010) Qualitative Inquiry: Thematic, narrative and arts-informed perspectives. Los Angeles: Sage

Cahnmann-Taylor, M. & Siegesmund, R. (Eds.) Arts-Based Research in Education: Foundations for practice. New York: RoutledgeFalmer

Clark, A. & Erickson, G. (Eds.) (2003) Teacher Inquiry: Living the research in everyday practice. London: RoutledgeFalmer

Duffy, D. & Bailey, S. Whose voice is speaking? Ethnography, pedagogy and dominance in research with children and young people.
Accessed: http://www.academia.edu/Papers/in/Critical_Pedagogy 24/5/2012

Eisner, E. (1998) The Enlightened Eye: Qualitative inquiry and the enhancement of educational practice. New Jersey: Merrill

Eisner, E. (1981) On the differences between scientific and artistic approaches to qualitative research. Educational Researcher, 10(5), 5-9

Flick, U. (Ed.) (2007) Designing Qualitative Research. Los Angeles: Sage

Flick, U. (Ed.) (2007) Managing Quality in Qualitative Research. Los Angeles: Sage

Garner, S. (Ed.) (2008) Writing on Drawing: Essays on drawing practice and research. Bristol, UK: Intellect

Irwin, R., Bickel, B., Triggs, V., Springgay, S., Beer, R., Grauer, K., Xiong, G. & Sameshima, P. (2009) The city of Richgate: a/r/tographic cartography as public pedagogy. International Journal of Art & Design Education, 28(1), 61-70

Kalmbach Phillips, D., Harris, G., Legard Larson, M. & higgins, k. (2009) Trying on - being in - becoming: Four women's journey(s) in feminist poststructural theory. Qualitative Inquiry, 15(9), 1455-1479

Knight, L. (2012) Grotesque gestures or sensuous signs? Rethinking notions of apprenticeship in early childhood education. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 33(1), 101-112

McElfresh Spehler, R. & Slattery, P. (1999) Voices of imagination: The artist as prophet in the process of social change. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 2(1), 1-12

Mitchell, C. (2011) What's participation got to do with it? Visual methodologies in 'girl-method' to address gender-based violence in the time of AIDS. Global Studies of Childhood, 1(1), 51-59

Moss, J. (Ed.) (2008) Researching Education: Visually - digitally - spatially. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers

Price, J. N. & Valli, L. (2005) Preservice teachers becoming agents of change: Pedagogical implications for action research. Journal of Teacher Education, 56(1), 57-72

Prosser, J. (Ed.) (1998) Image-Based Research. Oxford: RoutledgeFalmer

Rodriguez-Valls, F., Kofford, S. & Morales, E. (2012) Graffiti walls: Migrant students and the art of communicative languages. The Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, 32, 96-111

Saorsa, J. (2009) Drawing on Conversation: Drawing as a method of exploring and interpreting ordinary verbal interaction: An investigation through contemporary practice. Saarbrucken, Germany: Verlag Dr. Muller

Schultz, J. (Ed.) (2009) Griffith Review: Essentially Creative. Autumn.

Springgay, S., Irwin, R., Leggo, C. & Gouzouasis, P. (Eds.) (2008) Being with A/r/tography. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers

Sullivan, G. (2004) Studio art as research practice. In E. Eisner & M. Day (Eds.) Handbook of Research and Policy in Art Education. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. 795-814

Vicars, M. (2011) Artful practices: Identities at work in play. Global Studies of Childhood, 1(1), 60-70

Introduce myself

Dear All,

Thanks Linda for inviting me to join this project and blog.

This is Liang Li from Monash University Faculty of Education. I am a lecturer in early childhood education. My research interests are play and pedagogy, visual methodology, cultural-historical study, and family studies. I have received CRN fellowship for the second half of this year. I am very interested in drawing-based education research project. I have started collecting the drawing with my families, friends, students and children within last two months. I will share my thoughts and reflections in the near future.

Looking forward to the collaboration.

Best wishes,
Liang

This is a collaborative drawing I produced with a 7 yo.

Some of the methodological thoughts I made during the making of the drawing follow:

"The act of drawing is slow, so it enables careful and prolonged thinking on a topic. The forming of lines, marks etc. to make an image helps to refine initial ideas into theories and rationales. 

The idea for the drawing came about by thinking of the general aims and themes of the project, then to think about I might visualise this just from my surface thoughts. At this point I'm thinking about what I can theorise upon without reading first. The drawing then helps me to bring that onto a paper surface, to evidence it for others to see. This is a good process for mobilising fairly subconscious ideas and thoughts into action. The act of making the drawing guides me into further researching in a particular aspect of the themes that I want to know more about."

This is a page that was drawn collaboratively with a 7 yo and myself. You can't really read the writing too clearly, so I'll transcribe a snippet of it here:

"This is the latest of our collaborative drawings. As usual we had a brief chat about 'fairness' prior to beginning the drawing. I found that this time she was already thinking of what to draw in respect to that theme. I find this interesting because it shows she had continued to think about the concept between our earlier drawings and now.

The way we collaborated was interesting here too. She began by drawing the figure (1) in pen and also the sun (4). I then mimicked the figure (2) and proceeded to colour all three figures. She became interested in this and as I worked on those figures she added figures (5) (6) and (7), and she also coloured them. We had some spoken dialogue while she drew these extra details in. 

The next morning we talked about this image a bit more. She told me more information about the scenario. I see that this drawing allowed this discussion to happen as it gave both of us visual information to point to and look at and refer to in our conversation. This is more effective than trying to re-ignite a conversation with her the next day, from memory."

ethics information

Hi everyone

I've emailed out the ethics documentation for this project, so please keep copies of these for your own reference.

Can each of you please read the participant information sheet, complete the consent form and return that to me by post or email, thanks.
You will also need to distribute to anyone who draws with you the information sheet, plus a consent form. This includes children as well as adults, and also family members. I'll ask you to collect these and keep them until the end of the drawing phase and then I'll collect them from you.

Many thanks
Linda