Drawing/Writing and the new literacy; where verbal meets visual
Drawing/Writing and the new literacy: where verbal meets visual is a textbook/handbook for teachers and schools of education. It is also a parents’ guide to a home literacy program. The book provides classroom support for teachers across grades and disciplines who are interested in a broader approach to literacy, or who have already been trained in Drawing/Writing through workshops or school of education courses or via self-instruction. The book provides the same kind of support for parents. The 500-page book is illustrated with student work across grade and field grades K-12, as well as at the college level, and at the Elderhostel level.
What is Drawing/Writing?
Drawing/Writing is a theory, a practice, a book, and a course of study developed by a writer, artist, teacher, and parent. Drawing/Writing is for anyone - including parents and teachers and all other caregivers who work with children's minds - as well as any reader who is working on personal growth - who is interested in:
How important attention is to active seeing
How complex and modular the visual brain is, and how what the eyes see is only the beginning of visual thinking
How drawing and writing and mathematical notation and musical notation are connected, developmentally and logically - once we focus on human beings as mark-makers of significance. We are like other language-using creatures - except when it comes to mark-making; then, we are unique.
How aesthetics and moral education can be combined as soon as we start to talk about right relationships and acceptable differences in drawings
How much the brain's training and attitudes and beliefs affect and determine the quality and effectiveness and satisfaction of thinking over a lifetime. The learner determines the learning; the thinker determines the thinking. The brain is active, not passive. Early education at home and at school matters. Home and school are where each of our brains learns to think about itself and what it can and can not do. In short, to be active or passive.
How a theory called neuroconstructivism * (Sheridan, 1990) and a practice called Drawing/Writing, as well as a notion of multiple literacies, deepen and broaden our understanding of our minds and our potential for intelligent behavior. Like other dynamic systems, our brains are self-constructing and self-correcting. In these two truths lies our hope for the present and the future.
The book Drawing/Writing and the new literacy is divided into 4 Parts:
The Reasons Why:
This part provides the rationale for a new theory of education called neuroconstructivism * (Sheridan, 1990) and a new literacy strategy across content areas called Drawing/Writing. The rationale is from a combination of sources: art history, psychology, children’s drawings, the history of writing, and, most compellingly, neurobiology.
2. How to Do It
lays out the five-step Drawing/Writing program step by step while providing supplementary information, especially in connection with geometry, or the study of shapes in space. An ethics component is included in connection with abstract drawing using two new concepts: Acceptable Differences and Right Relationships.
3. Hitchhikers’ Guide to Brain Science
This section offers information on brain structure and function, including 13 tips for teachers, parents, and students on how to encourage and enhance brain development. This section includes a heightened-experience approach to school-based drug education programs.
4. The Thinking Child
This part outlines a generally applicable cross-modal approach to curricula called “The Thinking Child: A Thumbnail Sketch for Teachers and Educators.” This section includes detailed, illustrated cross-modal English and Fine Arts curricula appropriate K-12 as well as at the college level.
A Marks-Based Intelligence
“Only one thing is certain – that written language of children develops in this fashion, shifting from drawings of things to drawings of words. The entire secret of teaching written language is to prepare and organize this natural transition appropriately…Make believe play, drawing and writing can be viewed as different moments in an essentially unified program of development of written language…” Lev Vygotsky, "The Prehistory of Writing," an essay, c. 1930 in The Mind in Society, pp. 115-116, 1978.
Since the late 1980's, my work has followed in Vygotsky's footsteps. What I wrote in 2002 is valid today: "At this point in educational history, no child can be considered apart from its brain. Neurobiology gives us a new way to look at children, including their scribbles. Whether scribbles are pictures of neural activity or motor organizers, they are marks with a destiny. What other biophysical entity generates marks to explain and extend the parabolic burstings in its brain?" "Currently, some modes of parenting and many methods of education prevent the development of most of the marks a child could generate during its mental life. If parents and teachers let children scribble and talk about scribbling, draw and talk about their drawings, write about their own drawings, and talk about their writing, asked only to ready their own drawings and writings, first, before they are asked to read anyone else's, children will move more naturally into writing and reading. Learning delays and disabilities, short attention spans and a host of behavioral problems may clarify themselves as what happens when children are separated from what their brains have evolved to do in the course of the normal, natural developmental unfolding of a marks-based intelligence.
"Piaget and Vygotsky shared the understanding that the mind of the child is qualitatively different from the adult mind. Knowledge, intelligence and morality spring from the child's actions, and this 'child-action' is playful and experimental." (From “The Neurological Significance of Children's Drawing: The Scribble Hypothesis” (c) 2002 Susan Rich Sheridan.)
Written in 2002, these words hold true in 2009. Now – more than ever - the searching instincts of the child for positive thought and action provide models for adult behavior, worldwide. We all need to search for healthy solutions for our families, our communities, our planet; we all need to take responsibility for healthy entertainment – the kind playful fun that builds relationships and gives pleasure, even wisdom and joy. Marks of meaning point the way.
"Drawing/Writing and the New Literacy (embodies) insight on science education....demonstrating the value of hands-on, kinesthetic participation by the student of whatever age (and I'm one of them) in addressing the real world. Find out what others know - of course - but then repeat it with your eyes and hands, then add your own observations, and then, finally, own the subject. That's a good prescription for education generally."
-E.O. Wilson, Harvard University, January 8, 1998, in correspondence with Susan Sheridan.
Free Downloads
The following are downloadable PDFs related to Drawing/Writing and the new literacy
The Thinking Child: A handbook for parents: A quick overview of Neuroconstructivist theory and the 5-step Drawing/Writing practice.
Drawing/Writing exercise from Families and Drawing: Marks and Mind
