Graphic-narrative play: Young children’s authoring through drawing and telling

Abstract

This arts-based research illustrates how young children engage in ‘graphic-narrative play’ – a personal fantasy-based experience depicted on paper – while representing imaginary worlds centered on the topic, what the future will be like. The descriptions show how the children not only made representations, but also manipulated these in abstract ways as they created and recreated images, ideas and feelings. The findings illustrate how the child becomes a cast of one, taking on multiple roles (i.e., artist, author, director, scripter, performer and narrator) and selecting when and how to play with all the available voices offered through the multimodal media – drawing, ‘telling’, dramatization..