Making Meaning in the Company of Others

"The bad guys go in here." He was explaining his pastel drawing to me."Then they go around like this." He contorted his body to demonstrate."And this is the knife part." He pointed to a jagged pastel mark. "Sometimes they get stabbed, but sometimes they run away."He and his buddies had spent the morning excitedly scribbling on both sides of architectural printouts that a parent had brought in from her office recycling bin. The drawing took far less time than the explanations. In this case, we were learning about the details of a bad guy trap."Then they fall off this part, into this hole. They can't get out because the sides are too slippery."The process they had collectively developed was to declare your subject, say, a tornado, scribble frantically, sometimes using more than one color. The penultimate action was to crumple the paper into a ball before unfurling it, declaring, "This is my tornado." Then came the final step, which was a detailed explanation of what we were looking at.…