Teaching of drawing from an inclusive perspective: Figurative beyond vision

Abstract

Along the years, teaching of Art in interface with disability has had an increasing interest in the academic research field, mainly, in regard to special education; yet, studies are less spread when this teaching is discussed from an inclusive perspective. Thus, this present text is part of our Master’s Thesis: Drawing and Visual Impairment: A Visual Arts Teaching Experience from an Inclusive Educational Perspective, defended in 2015 at PPGEd/UFRN, aiming to contribute to the above mentioned discussion. The study belongs to the Visual Arts teaching field in the context of educational inclusion of students with visual impairments taking into account the participation of typical and visual impairment students, focusing on reading and drawing production research. The methodology approach used, from a qualitative nature, was action research, under the light of Bakhtinian’s principles of dialogism and alterity, with characteristics of an exploratory study design. The research took place in a state school located in Alecrim neighborhood, in the East area of Natal, RN, near the Institute of Education and Rehabilitation of Blinds – (IERC/RN). The chosen class for the intervention was the 7th C grade of the afternoon shift, with a total of 27 children raging from 12 to 16 years of age. 3 students out of 27 presented special educational needs, two blind girls and one boy with a mild visual and hearing impairment. Along the research 10 workshops with multisensory didactic sequences were provided, entwining corporal, tactile and graphic expressions. In this paper we will focus on the session called “Objects of the daily life” that is part of the first workshop of the intervention, describing and analyzing tactile exploration, corporal representation and visual-tactile drawing exercises. These exercises were systematized as actions that belong to the process of drawing production in school context, using the figurative drawing from the students own bodies as reference. The process and the data built in the research cause a reflection about the interactions between typical and visual impairment students in the production and the analyses of tactile-visual drawings. Interaction between peers was observed to be developed by verbal, tactile and corporal interchanges, occurring in each step of the didactic sequence that was proposed. Thus, demonstrating the students’ creativity in their choices, when developing the individual compositions, in pairs and collectively, involving the body and the sensory stimulations. Moreover, this process and the data, indicate the construction of a drawing teaching approach in the context of a typical classroom, being oriented by the multisensoriality pedagogic workshops that enable artistic and esthetic interactions in the school inclusion perspective.