Brandy Agerbeck • Making Room for Making
The antidote to feeling overwhelmed can be as simple as getting your ideas out of your head and onto a piece of paper. Once you place your internal thoughts and feelings into a drawing, you’ve made them tangible and visible, and you can see them from a new perspective. This tangibility gives you distance and separation from the problem you are trying to solve. Especially useful in groups, the drawing becomes an object to which participants can respond, rather than attacking each other.
The spatial nature of the blank page is the third powerful property of drawing. Writing defaults our thinking to lined paper—words lined up into sentences, paragraphs, pages. Drawing allows our thinking to move in 360 degrees on a blank paper’s surface. This flexibility in form allows for complexity. In a drawing you can sketch out all of the pieces of an issue at once, not just one at a time as in linear writing.
The fourth and final quality of drawing is its physicality. When you make a physical drawing you make choices: placement, proximity, scale, shape, line, color, shading. It is through making each of these visual and spatial choices that we make meaning for ourselves.
4. Drawn away
The fear of, and repulsion from, visual practice
There is power and joy in drawing, as we have seen in the first three sections. Yet we face resistance when we ask ourselves and others to embrace these visual tools.
The two biggest barriers to drawing are the fear of failure and the focus on a perfect product. The fear of failure most often takes the form of the Inner Critic who berates us, telling us we’re not qualified to even try. The critic questions one’s identity—“You’re not an artist”—confusing an action anyone can partake in (drawing) with a narrowly defined role (artist). There are Outer Critics too, who may or may not realize how fragile our willingness to draw can be. An offhand remark or a comparison can shut someone down instantly.
The focus on a perfect product comes from our product-focused culture. We’re embarrassed to show our working sketch. Sharing something imperfect feels like showing someone your underwear drawer. This lack of transparency leads to the impossible expectation to create something fully formed—product without process; delivery without discovery. Our product-reliant and consumerist culture makes us expect a product to do this work for us, a push-button solution—Give me the drawing program to do this for me, or a template to fill in. The tackling of complexity needs a tabula rasa to draw upon. There are no quick fixes to tough problems.
The word drawing is both a noun and a verb. Most fear around drawing is when we think of it as a product and expect to be judged on whether that product is good or bad, beautiful or ugly. This fear cuts us off from the beauty of drawing as a process, where messy, fast drawings can bring clarity. The only judgment of these drawings is whether they get us a step closer to our task at hand.
5. Draw together
Creating space for, and habits of, visual practice
Our goal is to help ourselves and others feel a sense of agency and autonomy; to feel empowered to use visual tools to tackle complex problems, find clarity, and take action. Here are my best practices for creating safe, yet challenging environments in which individuals and groups reclaim the power of paper and pen.
Disarm the Discomfort
There is great vulnerability in being in a learning phase, especially in a group setting, and even more so in a work setting. Feeling uneasy leads people to look for the escape hatch—making excuses not to participate, dismissing it as “just kindergarten,” saying “that’s not my job,” or giving up as soon as an instruction is unclear or a pen has gone dry. Acknowledge the discomfort, while keeping people engaged.
When I lead an exercise in synesthesia—specifically, large-scale abstract drawings inspired by instrumental music—I begin by saying, “We’re going to try something new and pretty odd. And if you hate it, the good news is it’ll be over in ten minutes.” This lets participants know that feeling uncomfortable is normal. And a fixed timeframe helps them ride out their discomfort.
Brandy Agerbeck • Making Room for Making
Be Mindful of Materials and Examples
Set people up for success. Give them the right tools for the job. For example, if you expect a group to discuss a wall of sticky notes they have written and drawn, give them sticky notes large enough to do their work and markers thick enough to be legible at a distance. When someone chooses to use their own ballpoint pen to draw, I’ll gently say, “Please use these markers so we can see your contributions.”
Using childhood materials, like Play-Doh, pipe-cleaners, and crayons, can bring joy and a sense of play to productive meeting. If someone denigrates the tools as too juvenile, simply say, “Yep, we’re going back to the sandbox to look at this from a different perspective.”
Don’t be precious about materials. The fancier the supplies, the more pressure people feel to use them correctly. Make a blank sheet of paper less scary by simply tearing it in two. Now you’ve made a familiar format (portrait, letter-sized) unfamiliar and more forgiving (landscape, smaller, torn edge). Make sure there’s an ample supply. A person can’t get in a generative frame of mind if they feel like you’re rationing Post-It notes.
If you want to share an example of what you’re looking for, make it comparable with the relative drawing skills of your group. Putting your best drawer to the task and making the example immaculate or fancy makes the model feel unattainable.
Create Dialog around Drawings
The reflection and conversations around process-focused drawing are as powerful as the drawing itself. I like to begin by asking, “How did that feel?” This opening can help diffuse nervousness and also reveal enjoyment. It tunes us in to our gut reaction.
Next, make observations. I ask, “What do you notice? What do you observe?” As professionals and adults, we are rewarded by making smart inferences. When possible, give yourself this space to use your senses before you come to intellectual conclusions. “I see a lot of people used red.” “Wow, we all created a lot of Post-It notes in a short amount of time.” Discoveries and nuance can be made when we stay in an observational space before we make meaning.
Tease out descriptions. Often people respond with “I like this” or “I don’t like that.” I follow up with broad questions such as “What appeals to you? Tell me more,” or “What turns you off? Is it confusing?” Often this leads to specific observations that invite conversation.
Let language be imperfect. One’s response may not be eloquent. There’s a beauty in the grasping. It is unfair to expect laypeople to be visually articulate. They are often quite savvy, but not well-spoken. Respect their wording, and listen with an ear towards understanding.
Acknowledge all contributions and look for connections and patterns. This task favors the synthesis thinker, and outsiders can see themes more easily. Invite this meaning-making by asking, “What themes are you seeing? Where are the overlaps?”
Avoid Expert-itis
Respect the work happening in the room and each person’s role and level of experience. You may be an expert in visual tools, but the participants are the experts in their content. Respect their drawings and never draw on their drawings or take over. Be careful not to lapse into artspeak or design jargon.
In my early days as a graphic facilitator, I was “farmed out” to help breakout groups in session. Often I was just drawing something specific and pretty, which let the participants lapse into being focused on product. Occasionally, I was able to really help a group develop a model. At worst, I arrived and they expected to me to do their work for them. Now I stand firm that I am there as a resource to teach them, ask questions, or help them think through their ideas, but that they think and draw for themselves. I don’t want my expertise to impede others developing their own.
Model the beha
vior you want to see. One of my most frustrating moments was when I was partnered with a facilitator who declined drawing themselves, saying, “Oh, I don’t do that. That’s Brandy’s job.” Sadly, they gave every single participant permission to opt out.
Watch What You Reward
Sure, clear penmanship and good spelling make a flipchart easier to read, but those qualities aren’t critical to meaning-making. People can suss out bad handwriting or misspelled words. If you single these qualities out to give someone a verbal gold star, you are distracting people from the process by praising the style of the product. This also puts people on the defensive about their own spelling or handwriting—skills few adults feel masterful about.
Brandy Agerbeck • Making Room for Making
Recognize the state of iteration the drawing is at. It may be messy. Messy may be exactly where it needs to be in that point of the process. Messy drawings can easily be changed and refined later, if need be.
Always reward people for high-quality process. Compliment them for the work they are accomplishing. The product, the object of the drawing, is the artifact of the process. The longer and more deeply you can keep the focus on drawing as a verb, the more action, accountability, and agency people will take for themselves.
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As of this writing in 2016, we are an increasingly visual and complex culture that is muddling through with old, linear, ephemeral methods that rely mostly on written and spoken text. The transition from fearful visual consumer to fearless visualizer takes care and guidance. You and I are the leaders in making room for making, in guiding people to reclaim drawing as a thinking tool and to make meaning through our wonderfully messy drawings. Through small acts—like the right markers for the task at hand, or saying a few encouraging words that help peers gain capacity and confidence—we create big changes towards a culture of visual mavens ready to think critically, communicate clearly, and tackle our most complex problems with paper and pen.
BRANDY AGERBECK writes, speaks and teaches on drawing as your best thinking tool. Her first book, The Graphic Facilitator’s Guide: How to use your listening, thinking and drawing skills to make meaning, describes the nuance and responsibility of being the one person in the room dedicated to drawing a group’s conversation. Her latest book, which teaches everyone visual thinking concepts to work through their thoughts and emotions, is The Idea Shapers: The power of putting your thinking into your own hands. Details and resources at Loosetooth.com.
Drawing-to-Learn
A general studies course for first-year college students
Dr. Laurence Musgrove
Introduction: Three languages
Creating lines and shapes through drawing is a transaction between the mind, eye, heart, body, and world. Similar transactions include reading and writing, which depend primarily on letters, and mathematics, which employs mainly numbers and letters. These three language systems are increasingly separated in school and developed in isolation. As a mode of learning and expression, drawing is traditionally relegated to the primary grades and eventually replaced by the more “mature” modes of learning and expression, writing and math. Consequently, visual thinking, learning, and expression are seen by educators and the public at large as more primal, basic, and immature methods for learning and communicating. Musical and movement practices suffer from the same undervaluation. Limiting language development to the narrow confines of textual and numerical practices impedes human engagement and progress. To explore ways in which drawing might actually enhance learning in school, I recently created an introductory college course on drawing-to-learn across the curriculum.
Personal and professional context
My interest in drawing as a teaching and learning tool has evolved out of my use of drawing in a wide range of writing and literature courses.
I regularly have students sketch responses to prompts in order to focus their thinking, or I have them provide me with images that depict their relationships with reading or writing. I have used student drawings in my research into reading metaphors, and I have taught courses on graphic narratives wherein students have drawn comics to represent their research. In preparation for each class, I draw the day’s lesson plan on a note card with simple icons, and then re-draw this visual agenda on the whiteboard at the beginning of each class.
Sample visual agenda note cards
Dr. Laurence Musgrove • Drawing-to-Learn
My interest is also demonstrated in my scholarly and creative work. I wrote a book, Handmade Thinking, on how students can use drawing to improve their reading engagement. My daughter Myra Musgrove and I co-authored an academic article in comic format for the Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning, titled “Drawing is Learning: To Understand and To Be Understood.”
I also co-authored with my daughter Myra a comic poem, “My Song,” which appeared in INK BRICK, a new comic poetry journal. All of these occasions have helped me see the value of visual thinking and presentation in teaching, learning, academic research, and my creative work.
Sample page from JAEPL article
Course design
In the summer of 2015, my faculty colleagues and I received an invitation from the Freshman College at Angelo State University to develop sections of a general studies course for first-year students. This course would be a one-credit-hour course, meeting two times a week for an hour, and running for the first eight weeks of the fall term. Each section of the course would focus on a faculty member’s area of interest. Each section would also include two written summaries of academic resources, an online introduction to information literacy, and general exposure to campus resources.
Because of my interest in “drawing-to-learn,” I developed the following description for my section of this Freshman Seminar:
This course provides you with an introduction to using drawing as a tool for thinking, learning, and communication in college. You will learn the values of visual thinking, doodling, common visual formats for problem-solving, and note-taking via simple drawing to easily capture recorded or live lectures. Advanced drawing ability is not a prerequisite for this course. You will learn sufficiently basic skills in order to complete coursework successfully.
A significant portion of the class time would be spent learning basic drawing skills, developing a visual vocabulary, and practicing six drawing-to-learn strategies. I also decided that I would use the special instructional support funds dedicated to sections of this course to buy each of my 25 students the drawing supplies they would bring to each class meeting: a set of 12 colored pencils, a blank Moleskine notebook, and a Blackwing Palomino Pencil.
Student grades would be based upon regular attendance and the following four assignments:
Two Summary Assignments. Students completed these assignments by (a) reading two articles on drawing-to-learn, (b) drawing handmade responses, and (c) writing a brief summary of each article.
Information Literacy Assignment. Students completed this online assignment by viewing a number of videos created by our library staff and by completing corresponding assignments.
Dr. Laurence Musgrove • Drawing-to-Learn
Sketchnote Response Assignment. Students completed this assignment by creating a sketchnote response to an approved university event, such as a public lecture.
Illustrated Speaking Assignment. Students completed this assignment by presenting a two- to three-minute speech on a topic or story they knew well while simultaneously illustrating their talk on the classroom whiteboard.
Successful completion of three of these assignments was dependent upon fairly intense, yet low-stakes practices designed to help students gain confidence in drawing, develop a vocabulary of images, and learn the six drawing-to-learn strategies.
Each class day was designed to include
drawing attendance, learning some basic skill or developing an image vocabulary, and practicing a drawing-to-learn strategy. At the beginning of every class, I distributed small index cards and asked students to write their names and the day’s date on one side, and then to draw on the reverse side an image, such as a self-portrait, a favorite thing or person, or a weather event. This strategy for keeping attendance and creating an initial sense of presence and comfort in the class comes from Lynda Barry’s Syllabus, a scrapbook/graphic narrative reflection on her attempt to establish a course at University of Wisconsin-Madison that uses writing and drawing by hand to promote present mindfulness. In this book, she includes a copy of her illustrated syllabus for the course, wherein she describes how her students will begin each class recording their attendance by writing and drawing on an index card. In my drawing-to-learn class, students turned this card in at the end of class, and at the end of the course, I returned their cards to them so that they might see the progression of their drawing skill and comfort.
For this attendance card, I asked students to draw a portrait of themselves at six years old
For the first two weeks, I taught basic drawing skills I learned from studying online video lessons from Dave Gray, Austin Kleon, and Doug Neill. Much of this work was helping students gain introductory confidence in drawing simple images. Along the way, they came to understand that the kind of image vocabulary I was asking them to develop had to be simple enough to be drawn quickly so they could capture and present learning as efficiently as possible. During this early period, I also showed students a number of TED Talk videos on creativity, visual thinking, note-taking, doodling, and drawing, such as those by Sunni Brown, Clive Thompson, Rachel Smith, and Brandy Agerbeck. These simple lessons and videos provided the visual and philosophical groundwork for moving students to the next series of daily mini-lessons on 12 categories of images that could be deployed in drawing-to-learn:
Drawn Together Through Visual Practice Page 2
