'We're just gonna scribble it': The affective and social work of destruction in children's art-making with different semiotic resources.

In this article, the author explores children's destruction of their artwork as it occurs on paper or digitally via an interactive whiteboard. Sociocultural accounts of children's art-making and social semiotic approaches to meaning-making offer a theoretical lens for understanding children's acts of destruction as meaningful and the way in which different semiotic resources shape the meaning-making involved in destruction differently. In order to explore this further, the author considers two episodes of art-making: firstly, an episode of child-parent art-making that ended in a five-year-old child scribbling over a drawing on paper with a black crayon, and, secondly, an episode of a five-year-old child using touch to cover over the drawing she had made on the classroom interactive whiteboard during free-flow activity time. A comparison between these two episodes is used to explore how digital and paper-based semiotic resources may impact differently on the experience of destruction and the affective and relational work that it can achieve. In this article, the author argues that a social semiotic exploration of destruction can help to move discussions of children's art-making beyond developmental preoccupations with individual intentions and towards a post-developmental account that engages with the richness of children's experiences and actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]