Content area
Full Text
Barely a month had passed since the first day of school and already four-year-old Hannah's space on the bulletin board was covered with drawings of horses. She had yellow horses, blue horses, and red horses. She had some horses looking to the left and others to the right. She had large horses and small horses. Hannah was a Kindergarten student in a linguistically and cul- turally diverse classroom of 16 four- and five-year- olds in a school located in a middle class neighbor- hood in a community close to the Greater Toronto Area in Ontario, Canada. In this column, I reflect on the student research done by Hannah, and her use of art as a tool for engaging in research focused on an issue of importance in her life. I close by talking about the implications of stifling educa- tional policies that make it more and more chal- lenging for teachers to create curricular spaces in which children like Hannah can engage in the kind of transformative learning that resulted from her student research.
Art as Research
The myriad of horse drawings clearly demonstrated Hannah's abilities as an artist. One particular piece, however, was anomalous. It was a drawing of a horse with a big X drawn across it. When I asked her about the drawing, she explained, "This means no horses allowed here in school. Only horse pic- tures are allowed here." After sharing her explana- tion, she proceeded to draw two more drawings of horses with an X, to be placed in different areas of the school. She said the drawings would "let people know that horses aren't allowed here."
The next morning, Hannah greeted me at the doorway to the classroom saying, "I think I choose to draw first. I have to draw pictures of horses to put up in barns because that's where they should be, in barns." On this day, she drew a number of horses without an X across them. Whether to add an X or not was a deliberate choice meant to con- vey a particular message. This was in keeping with the long-standing notion that during the early years, children become fluent and inventive users of sym- bols and that they readily use the lines of drawing...