Dear Friends
This mail is to intimate you regarding a book I have written on
drawing. As the publishers did not have any formal book launch I am
writing this to all those who might be interested in the topic.
The name of the book is SEEING WITH HANDS-exploring the potential of
drawing for cognitive development.
This book is the result of an unusual experiment in understanding
decolonization, deschooling, de-conditioning, and learning from
illiterate communities.
Living with illiterate communities made me realize some crucial
aspects of knowledge creation, the content of knowledge, and the
context and conditions. Literates learn the WORD whereas illiterates
learn the WORLD. We are made to ANALYZE secondhand information whereas
they CREATE KNOWLEDGE of their contexts.
This realization made me stop reading for a couple of years and it
looks like my cognitive system rewired. I was able to see how literacy
and schooling damage our natural cognitive process and rewires the
neural network in such a way that our senses get numbed/distorted.
It has been a long journey since then. from 1991 onwards......
This book came about from an experiment called reimagining schools
conducted in the outskirts of Pune from 2011 to 2014. There was no
teaching whatsoever and children had conditions to do what they would
do naturally. We documented all their activities and in that process,
we also documented their drawings. We were astonished to see the
connection between what children experience, what they ply, and what
they draw, clearly showing similarity between various other
developmental processes like crawling to walking, blabbering to
speaking, etc.
It was by sheer accident that I stumbled upon the idea that children
might be using drawing to understand the real world in terms of
two-dimensional space.¡±
This is a book on seeing- how children use drawing to observe the
world. The book is to initiate seeing- an invitation to become an
enquirer- to be like children, to observe, to touch, to feel, to
sense¡ and more importantly, to let understanding take place.
So, the invitation is to read the book without any forced agreement
but to rediscover what children do when they have the freedom to draw
and when they are not confused with our notions about art,
self-expression, skill, etc.
¡®Seeing with Hands¡¯ explores the cognitive potential of drawing to
understand the world. The book challenges our notion of drawing. It
establishes drawing as means to observe and make sense of the real
world. It also establishes the necessity of understanding drawing in
continuation with children's actual experiences, the toys & play they
create to revisit these experiences.
This was evidenced by three years of children¡¯s drawings done with no
adult interference, whatsoever - neither to correct or praise.
Naturally drawing became an activity that every child did to enhance
their observation rather than make artistic, skilled drawings.
This book is bound to lead to a new way of being with children,
respecting their autonomy and their innate ability to develop their
cognitive systems. This has the potential to enable adults- parents,
teachers, educationists, cognitive scientists, and psychologists - to
reflect on their schooling process and the way knowledge gets created
naturally.
So, this book challenges the modern paradigm of education which denies
our most fundamental right which is COGNITIVE RIGHT, THE RIGHT TO BE.
Hope you will find time to co-explore with me, this uncharted path.
Amazon.in -
Amazon.com -
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Jinan,
TEXT DISTORTS, DIGITAL DESTROYS, WORLD AWAKENS
<>
www.re-cognition.org
09447121544
Jinan