Drawing meanings from drawings

Drawing meanings from drawings

The potential for using drawings to interrogate practices in medical education is becoming more and more appealing as I delve into this modality. While images in terms of diagrams and imaging are integral components to medical training, asking individuals to draw on their experiences, thoughts and feelings through drawings is not common.

In our Faculty we have used drawings in a limited way with first year students. For several years I was asked to instruct my small group of students to draw their personal development illustrating their learning in a semester course. These images were interesting with frequent reference to metaphors such as growing beans, meandering rivers and flowers opening up. Thick wax crayons were used as cost was always a big concern.  I began to question how authentic such evaluations were, and whether we were actually rather facilitating students’ strategic actions to complete a desired task to please their teacher. As the facilitator of student learning, I grew to dislike the materiality of the crayons as it placed a childish perspective to the many course tasks that had potential. Later I introduced alternative stationery to offer more choice to the students.

In 2013 I used the title of this blog for a presentation at the Higher Education Learning and Teaching in South Africa (HELTASA) conference in Pretoria. It was a small part of a collaborative group project organized by our course facilitators from a professional development course run by the Cape Consortium for Higher Education (CHEC). This presentation is on Slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/VeronicaMitchell/drawing-meanings-from-drawings

Through recent involvement in two collaborative research projects where drawings are integral to the processes, my interest has been reignited. When we can better integrate personal insights and experiences into the drawings, they can become exceptionally meaningful with useful sense-making of situations. Last week I had the opportunity to ask 13 educators in the Faculty to create their individual drawings responding to a video clip from our Head of Department, now on YouTube at  http://youtu.be/kwBDT1JElWY 

Above is my simple and quick drawing indicating the ladder of 6 years of study that comprises the medical curriculum.  The majority of students enter the Faculty with great ambitions to be caring and to make a positive impact on health, yet along the climb and after graduation, there are many uncertainties and huge challenges that they face in our public health system that frequently leave them floundering sometimes resulting in them climbing off the ladder or at times falling.

My personal observations from these recent drawing projects:

Ø    Engagement with the task of drawing varies: some people dive in with great enthusiasm and others are frozen with uncertainty

Ø    Paper size: some use the large A2 option while others fold up the sheet to work on a smaller, more defined surface

Ø    Types of images: people, nature and conceptual representations indicate the varying connections made by individuals

Ø    Focus: Some avoid the real issues such as prevailing tensions using alternative images while others dig deeply into interrogating issues through their images

Ø    Colours: The choice of colour seems to be significant. For instance, monochromatic may indicate a single perspective as opposed to multiple colours and textures reflecting the complexities

Ø    Emotion: sometimes clearly evident, sometimes emerging through the oral description of the image, and other times missing

It feels like drawings can offer deeper insights than photos but are more challenging to elicit.