ERIC Number: EJ1213490
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2019
Pages: 5
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0004-3125
EISSN: N/A
Plot Holes in Children's Drawing
Schulte, Christopher M.
Art Education, v72 n3 p15-19 2019
Children "create stories in their drawings" and in the conversations and play that "surrounds and supplements" this drawing, are important. Indeed, children often engage with drawing as a way to narrate the questions and predicaments they find to be most pressing about themselves, about others, and about the changing world around them. In general, a plot hole is a gap or inconsistency in the storyline of a drawing, a break or fissure that works against the current course of logic that has been established by the drawing's plot. What is important to understand about plot holes, though, especially in the context of children's drawing, is that the inconsistencies adults often experience or perceive are not the result of children's ineptitude, an outcome that takes root because children are unable to maintain a storyline. Like adults, children too are inclined at times to act or make decisions in ways that appear to be, and perhaps are, lumbering and confusing, producing outcomes that are inadvertent, incomprehensible, even undesirable. The point is to acknowledge that children's drawing entails multiple, sometimes conflicting, logics. And it is because of this playful diversity of logics circulating through children's drawing, and the inclinations of children to move between and hybridize them, that plot holes exist, and that they continue to surface. As adults, then, especially as art educators, it is important that teachers acknowledge this dynamic; resisting the tendency to mark out these perceived gaps and inconsistencies as the authorial blunders of children, and instead recognize that plot holes are sites of mutation and creation, with the capacity to open others to new and particular working dimensions of "how" and "why" children draw as they do.
Descriptors: Children, Freehand Drawing, Art, Art Education, Art Teachers, Personal Narratives, Story Telling
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A