Seeing and saying – matter of communication context?

Kieran Egan wrote “we all begin as poets” (Egan, 2002) using imagination in making sense of our world. Young children often amaze us with their “poetic” expressions where their metaphors “sprawl” in different directions, connecting apparently unrelated things. These metaphors might not “carry the day” (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2006, p.8), but they might still reflect the world as it has been experienced by each of them. On the other side, what they see or say is probably also influenced by the contexts of communication: expectation to others, and what they might expect from one. For instance, by saying something unexpected you might get attention, show yourself off, make someone laugh – or “test” him/her!



Researching with three-year-olds, I have observed how the tiniest new-experienced details can remind them of their earlier experiences; I observed how a rhythmic sound of hammering reminded a girl of her embodied experience: “That’s my heartbeat”, she said. But each communication context is unique and it’s not possible to state just one reason why somebody says something – it’s much more complicated than that (I have learned from Robert Stake (2010) that one should be cautious addressing causality – we can never know for sure why something happens). Here is an event that made me think about a boy’s choices of what to draw, what to see and what to say.

I was a visitor in an early childhood centre. The children did not know me and I tried to observe from distance. When the joint activity ended, a 3,5 years old boy found a seat at the table close to corner I was sitting, found a piece of paper and started to draw. While he was drawing he was frequently looking at me and talking loud about the dramatic actions taking place on the drawing: There was a bad guy and a good goy. The lines over the paper, together with the energetic hand movements and the sounds he made, were indicating the good guy’s shooting on the bad guy. Somehow in the middle of the action the boy said “I” and it came out that the good guy (a super-hero) was actually himself.


The boy explained that the god guy killed the bad guy. I felt sorry for the bad guy (Or may be I simply got intrigued by the boy’s invitation to interact with him? …Or I (pedagogically-thinking) wanted to make him reflect about the act of violence he had just performed?). So I started to talk to the boy: “Oh, poor bad guy! What will his parents say when they find out that he is dead?” And he replied: “They won’t care – they are in jail!”

While the boy was verbally and visually making his story, I sometimes looked around the room to see what was going on outside our narrow conversation context. Even though the boy beside me seemed to be deeply engaged with his drawing, each time I raised my head, he immediately looked at me saying: “Don’t go!” or “Please stay!”


“May be some doctors can help him to get back to life?”- I tried again, and the boy drew an ambulance (not recognizable symbol), but he concluded: “None can help him now. He is dead! Not even a million doctors can help him!” And the good guy kept shooting, which resulted in large amount of crossing lines on the paper, until the shooting-lines had covered (almost) all evidence that any guys ever were drawn on the sheet of paper. He realized that the drawing started to look like something else. “Look, there is a spider web!”, he said. “Yes”, I said, and I noticed a little circle between the web-lines: “And here is a spider!”- I said pointing at the circle.

The boy straightened his back and looked at me seriously – almost angry: “No! That’s not a spider! That’s my penis” he said and kept looking me strait in my eyes for a long moment – as if he was testing my reaction. I tried not to look surprised and to continue the conversation: “Oh, it’s not a spider…” – but I was shocked. The boy got back to his drawing and started to draw a large, round spider with many legs, while I was trying to understand what had just happened.

The circle (the penis) could have been there all the time as a part of the drawing beneath. But the boy’s drawing of humans did not have any details, and I don’t believe that the circle was ever drawn as a symbol for a penis. Did the boy said that just to get my attention? He did not want me to go and he seemed to know which words had shocking influence on people (He might have for example experienced that if his older brother used the same word to shock their parents?)

This event can of course be interpreted in many ways – some people would, may be, get concerned about the violence, or about the boy’s vocabulary. And I, I am amazed by the boy’s communication competence – he really managed to impress me, engage my attention for more than 15 minutes, and motivate me to reflect in order to increase my understanding.


About the drawings: The boy did not want me to take picture of the drawing: “Only our teachers are allowed to take pictures!”, he said. So, the drawings presented on this blog are my son's, when he was 4 years old.

Egan, K. (2002). We begin as poets. In L. Bresler & C. M. Thompson (Eds.), The arts in children's lives: context, culture, and curriculum (pp. 93-104). Boston: Kluwer Academic.
Kress, G., & Van Leeuwen, T. (2006). Reading images: the grammar of visual design. London: Routledge.
Stake, R. E. (2010). Qualitative research: studying how things work. New York: Guilford Press.