children drawing and cultural products: how do mermaids appears?

Abstract

The present work seeks to examine the relation between some drawings produced by children of the third and fourth year of Elementary School, of a public school in Aracaju / SE, some images (films, illustrations, paintings, posters, coloring drawings among others) inspired by the mermaids and two epic poems that talk about these mythical characters, namely: Homer's Odyssey, and Ovid's Metamorphoses. Our discussions focus on the possible influences of the media and the cultural industry on children's graphic production and on how children construct their imagery references with these mediadriven examples. In this sense, it is a question of highlighting how these images affect the children's conception of Mermaids and the way they express these characters in their drawings, usually with fish-shaped imagery comprehensively reproduced by the media, an image we also ended up showing in the classroom through a painting, not considering the possibility of memaids having wings and/or feet. In addition, we look at some children's drawings whose imagery of the Mermaids was "copied" from drawings " to color". In this case, we observed that the copy standardized and impoverished children's drawings, blocking creativity and establishing between them a "correct" way of drawing the Mermaids. From these observations and the idea that the images are active in the construction of knowledge and in the ways of understanding and reading of the world, we set out to investigate this imaginary universe of the Mermaids to do a research work with the images, placing them in another position which is not the mere "illustration". In our conception, it is necessary to know the specificities of each language in which the image is conveyed in order to awaken a critical eye, above all, regarding the visual education of children.