Identifying Patterns in and Relationships Between Rural Canadian Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Children’s Graphic Representations and Their Talk

In this paper, we report on the first phase of an initiative we undertook to develop a classroom tool to document and describe children’s emergent writing. Here, we describe the process through which we developed an analytic framework to assist us in identifying patterns in young Indigenous and non-Indigenous children’s graphic representations in response to three formal tasks. Participating children lived in 11 northern, rural communities in two Canadian provinces. The resulting patterns, consistent with those described in the literature on children’s emergent writing, suggest the need to explore further how children use the verbal mode while representing meaning graphically.