One word can be worth a thousand pictures

Abstract

The sociology of childhood opened a new understanding of the way children are seen. As shown by several studies in the field of pedagogy (Oliveira-Formosinho & Kisimoto, 2013; Vasconcelos, 2009), children have achieved a status of competence, sophistication in their forms of communication and participation in their own peer cultures, extracting and appropriating, in a creative way, the culture of adults.

Based on the narration of “História da Carochinha”, the drawings produced by preschool children from two kindergartens, with the aim of identifying and analyzing the various elements of visual grammar, exploring the effects of telling a story (with and without images) on the child's graphic production and identifying the developmental traits or attributes of the drawing.

Children were divided into two groups (A and B), both exposed to the narration of the story, without images, in a classroom context. The parents in Group A were asked to narrate, without images, the same story, at home. An online version was made available to parents in Group B, so they could narrate the story using images. Again, in a classroom context, all children were asked to graphically retell the story. The analysis of the drawings produced by the children highlighted the influence of exposure to stereotypical graphic references on creative freedom in early childhood, particularly regarding the personification of characters and the inclusion of landscape elements not described in the narrated story.