Five ways of engaging with a drawing task: exploring children’s drawing processes and emergent systems thinking

This article is about children's drawing processes and emergent systems thinking. ‘Emergent systems thinking’ refers to children's awareness of a system's components, their interconnections and the flows that move through them. This study focuses on a video-recorded drawing session involving five five-year-olds who were invited to draw how they think water reaches the tap. My aim is to: (1) examine different ways of engaging with a drawing task and (2) identify signs of emergent systems thinking in the drawing process. Based in a posthumanist perspective, drawing processes are seen as an intra-actions involving pens, paper, children and teachers. This article shows five diverse ways of engaging with the drawing task, such as negotiating with teacher and paper where and what to draw or alternating between pen play and burst of focused drawing. These drawing processes also show several signs of emergent systems thinking. However, some of the visual responses to the teacher's question were eventually ‘disguised’ as the drawing took new turns, shaped by ongoing negotiations among children, materials, teachers and peers. This article suggests that educators should attune to drawing as a shared, evolving inquiry, rather than treating it merely as a final product.