Drawing to Learn

The inaugural Queenwood Just Draw festival recognised and celebrated the universal language of drawing across all subject areas as a tool for learning.

Drawing plays a significant role in our cognitive development. It can help us learn to write and think creatively, develop hand-eye coordination, hone analytic skills, and conceptualise ideas. ‘Drawing is the primal means of symbolic communication, which predates and embraces writing, and functions as a tool of conceptualisation parallel with language.’ (Petherbridge, 1991).

We first learn through our senses, and we express our connection to the world through the act of drawing before we learn to write. Any parent will have observed their children seeking to express and interpret their world through mark-making before they can communicate in other ways. Drawings are external representations of our thinking and when we were little, we were doing this all the time.

We have a word for being articulate with words: literacy. We have a word for being articulate with numbers: numeracy. But no widely accepted word for an articulacy with images. ‘Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, are generally agreed to stand for the important educational priorities of literacy and numeracy. However, writing itself is implicit evidence of another faculty of educational value: our ability to inscribe marks upon a surface to make meaningful representations of our experiences visible to others.’ (Riley, 2002). Thus, the development of visual literacy, ‘visualcy’ (Riley, 2002), should be just as important as literacy and numeracy in school.

Drawing can play a role in many different subject areas in school education, and later in the workplace. It has many purposes beyond simply rendering a likeness of something and, like any skill, can be taught and developed through practise. Our education system needs to produce innovative and creative members of society – students need be creative thinkers and problem-solvers. The key way they can be creative is by learning to translate thoughts and ideas into real and tangible things and the most accessible and direct method to achieve this is by drawing, the graphic way of expressing thought.

Drawing is used in fields like medicine to teach observation skills in diagnosis; in anthropology, as a method of taking field notes; in science, to document experiments and processes; in design, to conceptualise ideas; in architecture, to map out and explain spatial dimension and scale; and in technology, to develop prototypes and test ideas in the design process.

NICK MAVROGORDATO SENIOR VISUAL ARTS TEACHER

In visual arts it may be used to expand the imagination, express universal feelings, and record places, people and objects. In engineering and mathematics drawing is used as graphs and symbols to explain equations, coding and 3D modelling.

Everything that has been made or constructed originally came from a drawing. As such, drawing is fundamental to almost every field known to humanity. ‘You don’t have to be an artist to draw. This is what we mean by drawing to learn, not learning to draw!’ (The Big Draw).

You only have to imagine a world without the drawn mark to understand the vital role Visual Arts plays in forming and re-forming our understanding of our world. This is why we celebrate drawing at Queenwood. •