ABSTRACT
At a conference in New York in July 1995 I went to a workshop in which a bibliography was handed out. It was entitled ‘To draw is to write: on the restoration of drawing as a tool for writing’ compiled by Mary Kennan Herbert. It is a goldmine of information on works precisely in the area of my interest. Six months before, I had published a small book Writing the Future: English and theMaking of a Culture of Innovation (1995) in which I had used the phrase ‘writing a dinosaur and drawing print’. It shows how ideas are ‘about’. I have picked up ideas from three different areas: first from looking at what children do; from the ‘literature’ on children, inspired by the writing of Vygotsky and of Piaget; and from a broad and messy area, which I will call ‘communication and representation’—which ranges for me from art history to linguistics, with many stations in between. Here I will very briefly give a sense of the work of some people in these two areas of academic endeavour, mentioning two or three names only in each case.
