Mark-making Experiences: Drawing as Data, Methodology, and Pedagogy View Digital Media

Workshop Presentation
Tracey Bowen  

Drawing is a language that has been accessible to most of use since we could hold a crayon. Drawing helped us communicate about our world before we could write words. Three recent research studies that involved drawing as data, as methodology, and as pedagogical strategy, examined drawing as an accessible language for concretizing thought and emotion and communicating our lived experiences. Drawing facilitates sense-making about lived experiences in ways that help bridge gaps between what we don’t think we know, what we know from interacting with the world, and what we can imagine. Drawing as a research methodology provides insight into participants’ perspectives on their experiences in a way that words alone cannot. Drawing as an active pedagogy for problem solving provides educators, researchers, and students with an opportunity to understand multiple stakeholder worldviews and experiences before designing alternative solutions. Drawing is a language that can be analyzed as text (participant-generated drawings as data) as in the study What does knowledge look like? where data provides insight into the contemporary hieroglyphics and iconography that represent an abstract concept; as pedagogical strategy and problem-based learning process such as the study Picture this: Examining students’ pictorial organization and use of icons when visualizing a problem through collaborative drawing; and drawing as reflection highlighted in Drawing from Experience, participant-generated drawings about their Covid 19 pandemic experiences. A comparative analysis of the three studies provides insight into the common threads of imaging, reflecting, processing, and interpreting that visually stories our human experiences and inquiry.