THINKING THROUGH DRAWING: PRACTICE INTO KNOWLEDGE

(Jeff_L) #1

124 TEACHERs COLLEGE COLUmbIA UNIvERsITy


Using sketching: To Think, To Recognize, To Learn


duce the distinction: perception is “seeing what is
where”, it is detecting, and you are you are supposed
to get it right, if you can. Projection is “augment-
ing something”, so here, in a tic-tac-toe game, we
are given just the grid, there is nothing else there.
If I ask you to play the game in your imagination or
with somebody you project onto this with your little
imaginary x and you project their imaginary o and
so on; that is projecting, it is augmenting. Imagi-
nation is like full virtual reality. So you blind-fold
someone and have them play the game of tic-tac-toe
in their head, they are imagining the whole game,
so they are entertaining structure in their head and
they are processing, and it doesn’t matter what is
out there. That is pure imagination, unfettered.
We did a little experiment to see if people were
better at projecting than at imagining—to see if
they could do more and better at things if they were
projecting.
So we trained them on tic-tac-toe, by first hav-
ing them be able to call out the cells using numbers
(i.e. identifying the cells by numbers 1to 9) so if
they wanted to put the x there, they could call out
the cell number.
There were 3 conditions; one was a blank con-
dition, with a blank piece of paper. That was the
imagination condition. The second was called the
projection condition where you were given the table
(the grid) the third one; they had the table plus X
and Os.
What we found was that in general in tic-tac-toe
you didn’t get anything from the table / grid (the
second condition). I had expected that the grid was
going to facilitate and people would play better.
Anyway, we had had the foresight to do some
pretests on people to find out who were good visu-
alizers and who were less good. We found that the
strong visualizers indeed performed better and they
were a little bit better with the grid (second con-
dition) but not significantly better, and the weak
visualizers, they performed less quickly, but they
basically performed the same.
So we had found out nothing significant yet. We
said “oh well, I bet it will happen when we teach
them the 4x4 game”. So now they had to play tic-
tac-toe with 4 in a row. As we were hoping, every-
one did get better with the external table / grid.
So the task has to be difficult enough that you
cannot do it in your head, and then you can get
something from the external structure, you can lean
on it.


The weak visualizers really got a lot from the
grid, the strong visualizers got something, but less.
When we went to a 5X5 grid, we expected the
weak visualizers, if they can play the game at all,
to get a lot from the grid and we expected that the
strong visualizers will be able to play the game, and
will also get a lot from support of the grid.
So the idea is that external structure can help. In
fact it isn’t always the case for the 3x3 game: a lot of
people preferred the blank page. In the easy case of
the 3x3, they said of the grid “this is getting in my
w a y ”.
So it only helps when it is going to provide some
structure that you need or that you can use. What
we infer from this is that there is a cost to not play-
ing in the imagination and actually putting things
into a place in the world.
So this is all about projection. The implication is
that imagination is good, sometimes it is better than
projection, but sooner or later your imagination
dries up and you can’t play the game any further,
and you need external structure to facilitate you to
go further.
Now I want to move on. That was all about pro-
jection. I think it is a juicy phenomenon.
The second phenomenon is this: If you were an
anthropologist or archaeologist you have a ques-
tion when you are confronted by stones. In this
case one is a lithic axe, nature-made, and one is
man-made. How do you decide which is which?
That is the problem they have. The answer is by
extensions; there are principles of lithic illustra-
tion, established as ways you should make figures
of the stone i.e. how to sketch the stone. There are
rules: you throw away a lot of the detail and you just
accept certain things. You are looking for certain
things, you define the chips in certain ways, and so
when you look at the stone now the principles of
how you sketch it make the eye attend to the right
details. It teaches you what to throw away and what
to include. The most effective way of making a deci-
sion is to know the principles of lithic illustration
and to try sketching. So attention is directed to the
right things by the principles of how to illustrate.
The eye goes back and forth between the illustration
and the physical object, identifying what is the cor-
rect cue. So now we can see elements in the stone
that we could not see before, because we have built
this scaffold outside, that is helping to direct. It is
not a programme or a recipe. It does not say “Step 1,
Step 2, Step 3” but it does say that you have to meet
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