Learning to draw a picture: The social context of an individual activity∗

Individual activities in a classroom, just as much as group activities, are constructed by persons in a social context. In this paper, one period of nursery school drawing activities is characterized in order to examine drawing and learning how to draw in that context. The first section is an examination of the larger social scene. It is shown how a child's learning to plan and produce a drawing could be facilitated by the teacher's work in organizing the classroom as individual tasks. The second section is an examination of each task as a separate teacher‐child tutorial. It is suggested that a child could be learning to produce a drawing on the basis of the teacher's talk with him, particularly her work in soliciting and acknowledging his verbal formulations of the drawing.