The text of this article was originally presented in a public lecture in February 2008. It presents a description of earlier research on children's drawing practices which considers the ingenuity of learning and meaning-making through drawing. Then the focus moves to the language of assessment to consider how, art practices, such as drawing, as well as learner and teacher identities, are constructed and regulated within such linguistic practices (discourses). Bearing in mind the regulatory effect of such practices (and that all discourses are in some way regulatory) the final section introduces the idea of pedagogy against the state in order to think again an ethics of pedagogy concerned with becoming; an ethical imperative for pedagogy concerned with expanding our grasp of what learning "is."