Inclusive Practice: researching the relationships between dyslexia, personality, and art students’ drawing ability.

This paper addresses the conference theme of inclusivity from two standpoints. Firstly, involving collaboration between researchers from fields including psychology, educational study support and studio drawing practice, which has revealed insights into students’ learning difficulties in drawing, which are not easily accessible through mono-disciplinary research practice. Secondly it involves a proposal outlining a strategy for the teaching of drawing which attempts to include students of varying abilities in drawing, and to empower their practice equally. The paper demonstrates the effectiveness of an inclusive, cross-disciplinary approach to exploring the relations between personality factors, perceptual problems, visual memory and drawing skills in art students who report difficulties producing accurate drawn representations of their observational experiences. Results indicate that whilst in general drawing ability seems not to relate to dyslexia, higher drawing ability does appear related to the personality measure of conscientiousness, and also both to sex (in the biological sense, males drawing better than females) and to gender (those who perceive themselves as more masculine drawing better, whether they are male or female). Poor drawers are less good at accurately copying angles and proportions, and their visual memory is less good. These findings inform a proposed inclusive group teaching strategy for drawing which attempts to address these weaknesses without hindering the progress of the more able student