Children's Drawings: Iconic Coding of the Environment
Krampen, Martin (1991).
New York/London: Plenum Press; 230 pages. $99.00. ISBN 0306436477.
The title of this book, Children's Drawings: Iconic Coding of the Environment, promises more than it delivers for anyone with an interest in the ways environments are represented. The book is in two sections. One of these offers a partial review of general research on children's drawings. The other considers research on children's drawings of buildings, and presents the results of studies in which children were asked to draw buildings or to name buildings when presented with drawings. These drawings are consistently of single buildings: some distance from what one might hope to see from the reference to environment.
If one abandons the hope of finding any account of how children relate parts of the environment, or even several buildings, to one another, what is to be found? There is, first of all, a consistent interest in placing children's drawings within the context of semiotics. (The book is, in fact, part of a series with the title, Topics in Contemporary Semiotics). A drawing is treated “as a complex sign that stands for something else” (p. 3): a perspective that leads to a heavy emphasis in the research review upon the work of Piaget, Luquet, and Olivier, and to a strong interest in the vocabulary of signs (the “graphemes”) that children acquire and in the ways in which these are combined with one another. Oddly, little connection is made between the parts of this research that deal with combinations of graphemes and research that is placed under the label of “drawings as a problem of production” (p. 42). The latter is quickly set aside, although much of that research deals specifically with the way in which children come to combine the symbols under their control. Odd also is the failure even to mention the classic work of Kellogg, even though one of Kellogg's major concerns was to delineate the way children's drawings emerged from the combination of grapheme-like units.
The analysis of research on the drawing of buildings is more rewarding. Particular attention is given to the question: How do children signal their understanding of the difference between one building and another? Between, for instance, a house and a church? This rewarding question was the starting point for a 1979 study by Krampen and his colleagues, a study in which Turkish children aged 3-12 years were asked to draw on one page an office, a factory, a mosque, a school, an apartment building, and a house (p. 86ff). The same question was a major part of a later study (Krampen 1986), restricted to two building types (a house and an apartment building) but comparing the productions of Turkish with German children and, within the German population, of children without disability and children with cerebral palsy (a 1982 study by Brucker).
The drawings analyzed statistically are the work of 142 children “selected from samples in previous studies” (p. 146). Four hypotheses are tested about possible differences between the drawings of six building types by Turkish and German children. In this analysis the main concern is the possible effect of a difference in cultural environment. The effects of an urban versus a rural environment are included in a reference back to Krampen’s 1986 study, in which rural children, with less exposure to various types of buildings, produced drawings that were less differentiated from one another than did urban children. What the current book adds is a detailed analysis and the placing of the study and its results within a general theoretical position.
For the reader interested in the impact of environment, a first set of interesting results has to do with children's use of various features in order to distinguish among buildings. Some of the features are architectural. For houses, churches, and factories, children in both countries use features of the buildings themselves to show a difference. Where the architectural features are not strongly distinctive, however –such as in the case of office buildings, apartment buildings, and often school buildings -children resort to using as markers the presence of a flag (for schools) or signs of the type of activity that occurs in the building. The need to resort to such markers, in Krampen's view, could be used as an index of poor environmental quality because, according to the model developed at the beginning of the book, “distinctiveness must be rooted in the built environment” (p. 194).
A second set of interesting results appears in a study that forms part of the final chapter. Offered as a way of determining children's mental images without the involvement of children needing to produce drawings, this study asks young children -the average age is five years- to identify buildings by answering the question “what is this?” when presented with schematic drawings of several types of buildings. The results show that children at this age place buildings into some major categories. One of these consists of buildings that are large, vertical in shape, and have many windows (“high-rise” in the children's words), with little distinction among offices, apartment buildings, and schools. A second category consisted of buildings that contained some vertical extension: chimney stack or a steeple. The children might sometimes label these as churches, and sometimes as factories. The drawings in the third category were mostly labeled “house.” The fourth attracted a large number of “don't knows” or, when named, a mixture of labels. These are the kinds of buildings one would now suggest that architects or producers of books avoid if they wish children to make accurate readings of the texts they present.
All told, this is a book with mixed appeal. The publishers, however, have been generous in the inclusion of many of the children's drawings, and the concern with distinctive features yields an interesting story with an eventual moral. The theoretical framing -clearly the part dearest to the author's heart in this presentation- unfortunately fails to develop the role of distinctive features in a way that could have been fitted into an interest in buildings as signs and, in its present state, will often not be easy or persuasive for the wide audience the author hopes to attract.
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