As I set out to design a micro teach session I thought about what I wanted to find out about my peers’ responses to, attitudes towards and experiences of drawing were. My interest in drawing as a multi-faceted tool and skill has been with me for many years, through my childhood, as a student up to master’s level, and as a teacher. I am interested in questions ??? such as ‘what’s is drawing for’, ‘how can drawing be used as a thinking tool’, ‘ why is drawing a valuable activity (for art students and visual thinkers)’, and ‘what is the value of drawing by hand in a digitally driven environment’. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, why am I so interested in drawing by hand? What is it about drawing activity that I believe is so valuable?

https://sparkjournal.arts.ac.uk/index.php/spark/article/view/99/175

• Berger (2012) ‘On Drawing’
• The Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize (I submitted work for this prize in 2019 and am working on a submission for 2023)
• A peer drawing group I instigated as an MA student that explored observational drawing techniques for illustration and graphic design students
• Qona Rankin’s research into the links between drawing and dyslexia https://www.rca.ac.uk/more/staff/qona-rankin/

https://www.academia.edu/32424343/ExPLORING_THE_LINKS?email_work_card=view-paper

• My work as a Specialist support teacher to children with dyslexia and co-occuring issues ie. the deployment of visual and multi-sensory learning methods to engage visual thinkers in learning literacy

The above research further informed my thinking around the subject of drawing in planning my micro-teach session. Particular, more focussed questions arose centred around the possible purposes of drawing – research, documentation, reflection, to enhance memory, for communication, expression, for mindfulness, auto-ethnography and biography, the cognitive processing and effects of drawing, to create meaning and understanding of experience and emotion.

What do I mean by ‘drawing’? Using traditional and non-traditional drawing mediums to create marks on a surface resulting in a unique manifestation of the drawer’s identity and view of the subject/world/experience ,mind and more.

Drawing as a sensory experience – I consider the ways that learning and experience occurs in complex ways, and in addition to the commonly accepted 5 sensory experiences of sound, sight, touch, taste, and smell, with neuro diverse brain types: proprioceptive sense (experience of one’s body parts in relation to each other, and other people, ‘personal space’); visibular sense (the body in relation to surrounding space, eg. dangling feet, hanging from a tree branch in a forest or playground); introceptive sense (internal bodily sensations, eg. stomach cramps or ‘butterflies’ (due to nervousness; hunger, cold, thirst). This needs further research in order to develop my thinking around how these additional senses might impact on learning in general, and in the context of drawing activity (eg, sensory processing disorder’).

I considered the different ways in which research can be structured and recorded. A good research question needs specificity. Reporting research can go academic writing styles to include, eg. a report, interviews, visual imagery (as seen in a peer’s introductory presentation that included a series of images as their PhD paper, something I had not seen previously), media and sound.

I also considered the wider context of the purposes of research: the national and international impact and context of myself and student participants; the possibilities for community building; issues of inclusion and diversity; cultural experience; silence; the theorisation of human experience (ontology, ethnography, sociology, auto-ethnography).