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Abstract
Childrens drawings, as artifacts, have fascinated researchers for the last two centuries. Countless studies have been conducted from psychological, anthropological, linguistic and aesthetic perspectives. What these studies suggest is that children are prolific visual communicators, adept at coordinating a variety of modes of representation to communicate experience. For just this reason, drawing as a tool for facilitating language and literacy has long been employed by early childhood educators. The common core standards for language arts in kindergarten now recommend that a combination of drawing, dictating and writing be used as a tool for developing literacy. Though many studies of childrens drawing now extend beyond developmental and aesthetic concerns, putting forward notions of drawing as socio-cultural performances and connecting childrens image-making to emerging literacies, few examine in detail embodied, material, and dialogic relationships. In an eight-month ethnographic case study of childrens drawing in the language arts curriculum of a public kindergarten, I looked at ways children draw in their daily writing journals. Using an eclectic array of post-structural theories including Bakhtins (1981) dialogism, Butlers (1993) performativity, Bennetts (2010) vital materialism, and Aokis (1993) lived curriculum, I situate childrens drawing as assemblages within the kindergarten classroom, confederations of diverse elements in which materials, environment, dialog and discourse, along with children, their peers and their teacher are given equal consideration. Five focal children appear as actors in each drawing event, operating simultaneously with other things as receptors, transmitters, catalysts. Their teacher, another actor in the assemblage, a magnetic force woven through each narrative, at times orchestrates events and other times disrupts them. In looking at childrens drawing as events, occurrences with embodied, material, or dialogic characteristics, I hope to extend perceptions of childrens drawing beyond indicators of development, aesthetics, or literacy acquisition into embodied, agentic practices with significant cultural implications.