Drawings of Children With Visual Impairment and Their Reading and Writing Processes

This work, based on Historical-Cultural Theory, seeks to analyze the drawing of children with visual impairment. Based on the Vygotskian assumption that drawing is a form of writing, we ask: what reading and writing processes are experienced by children with visual impairment when drawing? In order to answer this question, we present the experience of a storytelling and drawing workshop held at an institution specialized in visual impairment, with students aged between 7 and 11 years old, which took place in 2022. In our results, we highlight that children with visual impairment draw, when given the opportunity, revealing unique ways of abstracting and generalizing concepts. To this end, the children revealed: (a) distinct ways of meaning beyond the sense of sight; (b) the intriguing relation between verbal language and image production; (c) the importance of mediation in the drawing process. We conclude that drawing is, for children with visual impairment, an activity that engages the same functions observed in children without visual impairment, differing only in the mechanisms of access and performance of the activity, guided by specialized techniques and tools. This activity is established, above all, with the organization and recording of the child’s thoughts, occupying an important space in the process of elaborating readings and writings about reality.