drawing in childhood as initiation to the secrets of the world

Abstract

In order to highlight the intimate relationship between imagining, drawing and making worlds, this essay questions the educational meaning of initiating children into the action of drawing, in the face of the growing cultural tendency of the body being less and less required to produce sensuous meaning. The incarnated action of drawing, as an aesthetic action of touching and being touched by the world when transposing the visible limits and entering into the intimacy of worldly invisibility, constitutes an experience that is as recurrent and trivialized in school daily life as it is existentially complex due to its poetic power to enter the invisible and inaugurate worldviews. The historical disqualification of the image and of imagination in Western thought, supported by the separation between the subjectivity of the body and the objectivity of the world, does not allow educational thought to consider the phenomenon of poetic imagination as an existential experience of language's insertion in the world by way of the gesture of drawing. This gesture finds its specificity in the instant the hand traces and inscribes lines on a surface. The aesthetic gesture of drawing, temporalized by the rhythm of the body in the emergence of the fabulation that accompanies the repetition of lines, implies a poetic experience of a language that involves the fusion of two senses: that of the material gesture and that of the mark configured by that gesture-marked and cicatrized on the surface by the body's action that performed it. The approximation between education, art and childhood allows us to highlight the philosophical and pedagogical tensions that involve the question of poetic imagination, and to take another look at the action of drawing in the context of children's education. What emerges, from the dialogue between Gaston Bachelard, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Luc Nancy, is the relevance of the educational intention of caring for the vital function of language as an aesthetic and poetic experience that is constituted in the of the body by making something appear that produces and contains presence, and which promotes and expands the existential density of the real.