INTERPRETATION OF NARRATIVE ILLUSTRATIONS: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE CHILDREN FROM INDIGENOUS AND FORMAL ART EDUCATION BACKGROUNDS

How do social environments with their diverse contexts influence interpretation of stories and art making? And how do children of different art-education backgrounds respond to stories and interpret them in images? This paper discusses experiments conducted with three groups of children, each representing different socio cultural education background and learning patterns; an indigenous home learning pattern and formal art education background. The study sets out by narrating the exact same story to children belonging to both the communities and analyses the interpretations and representations of the story, through their artworks and narration. The first group in this experiment is the children of the indigenous tribe of Madhya Pradesh, the Bhils, whose exposure to art is from an early age, in a home learning setup within the community. The second and third group is the children belonging to an urban area, Mumbai, who have been exposed to art education curriculum in schools.

The study investigates the associations and forms of expressions that are subconsciously represented in these illustrations, by the children. In the case of Bhil children, art is a way of life, and it is closely related to their culture, beliefs, practices and this reflects in their reception of the narrative itself. Their focus on the story as a whole stems from their idea of art as a narration technique or story-telling method. In contrast, the group of children belonging to the urban areas paid more attention to the scenes, rather than the narrative as a whole. The findings suggest that children from indigenous art education backgrounds respond to narrative patterns where as children from formal art education backgrounds respond to the scenes or the present sequence.
The research further explores how the different social environments and their diverse contexts; one very closely connected to nature and the other the contrast, has an impact on the reception, understanding, visualization and representation of the same idea.