Activity
Tactile drawing: Expanding creativity and social inclusion
Students use drawing to express themselves, explore their creativity to tell stories, and for rich social connection.
This is a fourth video post on providing tactile graphic rich environments for preschool and elementary students. This post will provide some focus and discussion on a student’s progression with drawing and how he uses the APH Draftsman Tool.
Like his peers, the themes of Logan’s drawings become more complex including magical beasts with varied shapes, attributes, and abilities and more details such as claws, wings, and teeth. Logan is also using more textures to represent things like scales, hair, or feathers. Also, he uses conventions and symbolic marks such as lines that indicate running or “sparks” for magical powers.
Drawing progression
- Marks that are not recognizable visually (to others), but Logan can describe as part of a story like “that’s the baby lizard”
- Forms more recognizable visually, like a circle with lines for an animal with legs
- Stick people and animals, more details such as wings and tails
- Use of drawing to illustrate academic fiction and non-fiction writing assignments
- Bodies, arms and legs of people, animals, and creatures represented with shapes such as oval body of an animal or rectangular shapes for a shirt on a person
- Textures and fills added to represent features such as fur, scales, or spikes
- Multiple characters and action represented, such as a dragon breathing fire or flying
- More details that show the setting, like a path that characters follow or a portal to another world
- Accurately repeating same element
- Growing ability to plan use of space, such as placing body in middle and leaving room for head and tail.
- Elaborate drawings with layers of elements and story line, like creatures with superpowers
- The ability to copy drawing from a 2D tactile example
- Instruction in and application of technical understanding, such as using proportional guidelines to draw face and body
- Creating multiple drawings of the same thing in order to practice and achieve desired final images
The school art teacher shared that, “There is always a narrative with the drawings.” Like the other kids, his drawings include animals or imaginary beings on a journey quest or shows a portal to another world.
Image: Logan’s drawing: Self-portrait with his dog drawn on his shirt.
Note: The drawing film is scotch taped to the table top so that it does not move as Logan explores his tactile drawing.
Video Tactile Drawing:
Key points
- Don’t limit your expectations!
- Help make meaning out of tactile imagery – teach salient features and build conceptual understanding, learn from your student
- Tactile details in drawings are symbols for things in the world and concepts (just like the braille alphabet are symbols for letter names and letter sounds)
- Drawing is universal, purposeful, and needed and follows a developmental progression whether it is visual or tactile – provide the tools!
- Support inclusion and access: make student’s tactile drawings visually accessible, provide and encourage use of tactile drawing tools by sighted peers and family
Late elementary strategies to support fluency with tactile pictures and drawing
- Student will be gaining fluency with graphics, diagrams, and academic tactile materials – have student create materials also
- Support student in art class to access as much of the instruction as possible
- The purpose and meaning in drawing can develop in the same way for a blind student as it does for sighted peers
- Copy from models
- Create swell visual/tactile graphics of student’s artwork on drawing film – share with family
- When student projects displayed, create visual/tactile versions for display for drawing film drawings
- Iterations – practice, practice, practice, refine
- Review past work, looking at your drawings brings you back to that time and those stories
- Learn from your student, ask questions, see what works
- Encourage the process not the product, encourage the same language other kids are using about their drawings
- Describe what’s happening socially, who is drawing what, have other kids describe their drawing, let student know other kids decide to restart or erase mistakes and repeat same drawings
- Learn your student’s representational language
- Consider interdependent projects where student is collaborating and directing sighted adult or peer in art making process (e.g., do you want a mountain background or ocean background for your creature? What colors do you want here?)
Resources
Other posts in this series:
- Tactile graphic rich environments series: The missing link, Intro
- Preschool: 2D tactile materials supporting play and literacy, part 1
- Early elementary: Tactile pictures and drawing, engaging student in literacy activities, part 2
- Upper elementary: Tactile pictures supporting literacy and social connections, part 3
- Tactile drawing: Expanding creativity and social inclusion, part 4
- Tactile description: Building language and concepts, part 5
- HOW TO turn tactile drawing film into PIAF picture – sharpie method
- Making a tactile image with iPad, Goodnotes and Swell machine
Ideas and videos are by Jessica McDowell; post co-written by Diane Brauner
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