ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the classroom environment and how it acts as a third teacher. My interest is more specifically to question the pedagogical relationships between young children and their drawing in an attempt to understand how the environment acts as an art teacher. To do so, I invite the reader to join me in Miss Kathy’s four-year-old classroom, a space where materials, assembled together as provocations, are used in important ways with children’s drawing. Drawing on the concept of “environment as third teacher” proposed by the municipal preschools of Reggio Emilia, I intend to argue that the physical structure of the classroom, and the learning materials of the environment, enacts a crucial, non-human, teacher who exerts agency in the drawing practices of young children. To do so, this chapter explores drawing pedagogy in a Reggio-inspired preschool and examines its relationship to the teaching environment.
