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