Abstract
This article investigates how teachers in Swedish preschool class conceptualize and make sense of multimodality in relation to children’s early literacy learning. While multimodal perspectives have become increasingly influential in literacy research, emphasizing that meaning is made through multiple semiotic modes, such as image, gesture, movement, and material manipulation, less is known about how teachers themselves understand and value these modes in classroom practice. Drawing on a qualitative interpretative research design, the study is based on semi-structured interviews with sixteen preschool-class teachers across seven schools in Sweden. The analysis, guided by a social semiotic and social constructivist framework, identifies four interrelated themes: (1) multimodality as familiar yet conceptually elusive, (2) multimodality in practice: rich enactments and epistemic tensions, (3) modalities as tools, supports, and values, and (4) navigating constraints and possibilities. Findings reveal that while teachers’ everyday practices are deeply multimodal, integrating drawing, song, movement and digital media, their understandings of literacy remain predominantly anchored in an alphabetic and linguistic norm. Multimodality is enacted intuitively but seldom theorized, often positioned as instrumental support for writing rather than as an epistemic mode of knowing and meaning-making in its own right. The article argues that this conceptual gap underscores the need for a shared professional metalanguage for discussing multimodal literacy pedagogy. By foregrounding teachers’ lived negotiations of multimodality, the article contributes to a deeper understanding of the role of multimodal communication in, and current trajectories of, early literacy education.
Introduction
Over the past decades, research on early years literacy education has undergone significant conceptual expansion. Traditional understandings of literacy as primarily reading and writing alphabetic text have been challenged by research emphasizing the multiplicity of modes through which meaning is made and communicated, including the multifaceted ways in which children develop literacy (Fast, 2007; Kress and Jewitt, 2003). Scholars working within social semiotic and multimodal frameworks (e.g., Bezemer and Kress, 2008; Jewitt, 2008; Kress, 2003) have demonstrated that language, image, gesture, sound, and material form are all integral to how humans represent experience and construct knowledge. In early childhood education, such perspectives have been particularly influential, as they foreground the diverse semiotic resources through which young learners engage with their surroundings and express understanding. In Sweden, where this study was conducted, this broadened understanding of communication and literacy is reflected in the national curriculum’s emphasis on “different forms of expression” as central to children’s learning and development (Swedish National Agency for Education [SNAE], 2022, eg., p. 9). The preschool-class (förskoleklass), positioned as a bridge between preschool and compulsory school, has had a specific mandate in this regard. According to the SNAE, the preschool-class should encourage a multitude of expressive forms and provide children with opportunities for exploration and play-based learning, while simultaneously preparing them for the more structured and goal-oriented practices of primary school (ibid.: 21). Although its steering documents do not prescribe as explicit and imperative regulations as those for later school years, the preschool-class is described as a space where preschool pedagogies and school-oriented teaching practices are to meet. Teachers in the preschool-class, often representing both preschool and primary school backgrounds, are therefore expected to design learning environments that support children’s meaning-making across different modes and media. In this sense, the preschool-class serves as a key institutional site where ideas about multimodal meaning-making are intended to be enacted in pedagogical practice.
However, the Swedish government has now moved to transform preschool-class into the first year of primary school as part of a new 10 year primary school system (Government Offices of Sweden, 2025). This reform makes the present study particularly timely. If the preschool class functions as a pedagogical site where play-based, multimodal, and school-oriented literacy traditions intersect, its incorporation into a more formalized primary-school structure may reshape how multimodality is understood, valued, and enacted. Examining teachers’ current conceptualizations therefore provides insight into the literacy logics that may be reinforced, negotiated, or potentially marginalized in the transition toward a 10-year compulsory school. This has motivated the present study to explore current preschool-class teachers’ understandings of multimodality as an aspect of children’ s literacy development during preschool-class. In the Swedish context, although multimodal practices have been recognized as part of the early literacy landscape, there is limited research on how teachers themselves conceptualize the term in relation to their own classroom work. The ways in which teachers interpret and operationalize multimodality are furthermore not only a matter of personal pedagogical stance, but also a reflection of broader ideological and institutional framings of literacy and learning. This makes the question of teacher conceptions particularly interesting; situated within the preschool-class, where pedagogical traditions from early childhood education meet curricular demands of compulsory schooling (cf. Ackesjö and Persson, 2014). Teachers working in this transitional space must navigate tensions between play and instruction, exploration and assessment, and between multimodal and monomodal (predominantly linguistic) forms of literacy. These tensions make the preschool-class a productive site for investigating how multimodality is negotiated in practice, not only as a theoretical construct, but as a lived, interpretive, and contextualized part of teachers’ professional repertoires.
The present study examines how preschool-class teachers in Sweden understand and conceptualize multimodality in relation to teaching and learning. Specifically it asks: (1) How do teachers describe their understandings of multimodality and its relevance for children’s learning? (2) How can the educational affordances of multimodality as well as various modalities be articulated based on teachers’ professional experiences and conceptual understandings?
By situating these questions within the current Swedish literacy policy context (SNAE, 2022) and the ongoing reform (see the following contextualisation) that will integrate the preschool class into a 10-year compulsory school, the study addresses a crucial moment of transition in early literacy education. As the preschool class stands between preschool and primary school, soon to be absorbed into the latter, it represents a unique and time-sensitive site and a particularly rich context for understanding how multimodality is enacted and made sense of in practice. The article therefore seeks to capture teachers’ lived experiences and conceptual negotiations of multimodality within this intermediary educational space, where pedagogical traditions of play, exploration, and creativity intersect with emerging demands for structure, assessment, and subject-based learning. In doing so, the study offers insights into how multimodality is translated from theory to practice, i.e., how it is taken up, reinterpreted, and potentially transformed in the everyday realities of a school form on the verge of reform.
The context of the Swedish preschool class
In the Swedish educational system, the preschool class (förskoleklass) occupies a unique intermediary position between early childhood education and compulsory schooling. Introduced in 1998 as its own school form, the preschool class is intended for children around 6 years of age and has the dual mandate of bridging the exploratory, play-based culture of preschool and the more formal learning environment of primary school (SNAE, 2022: 21). Under the prevailing legal and curricular framework, the preschool class is formally part of the public school system, though it retains a pedagogical emphasis that resonates with early childhood traditions: children are to be encouraged to engage in multimodal activity, combining a variety of modalities for communication and creative expression. The national curriculum for preschool class explicitly emphasises “different forms of expression” (“många olika uttrycksformer”) as central to children’s learning and development. In this way, it is our understanding that the preschool class may provide a key institutional site for the enactment of multimodal literacy practices.
However, at the time of writing, the preschool class is also the subject of a major structural reform proposal. The government’s proposition (Prop. 2024/25:143) proposes that the preschool class be discontinued as a separate school form and replaced by a new first year (årskurs 1) of the expanded primary school (grundskola). Under this model, primary school is to be extended to 10 years, and the former preschool-class year will be fully integrated into primary school. The rationale underpinning the reform emphasises the goal of a more coherent and consistent school career: the transition from preschool to compulsory school would no longer involve a change in school form, thereby reducing institutional discontinuities and strengthening the framework for early subject-based learning and assessment. Yet this change has sparked debate among opponents, proponents and critics (e.g., Aringer, 2024; Eidevald et al., 2021; Fuglsang, 2024; Pramling Samuelsson, 2025; Sveriges lärare, 2025). From an early childhood education perspective, the current preschool class is valued precisely for its liminal status: offering a less formalised learning environment in which children can develop communicative, social and semiotic repertoires through playful, multimodal exploration rather than through structured instruction alone. Critics argue that dissolving the separate preschool class risks accelerating the move toward alphabetic, subject-based literacy and reducing space for familiar means of communication and being, including multimodal meaning-making, prior to formal schooling, thereby undermining the role of the preschool class as a transitional bridge between preschool and compulsory schooling. Thus, the preschool class currently stands at the intersection of two competing policy logics: one that privileges a play-based, multimodal and developmentally oriented pedagogy, and another that seeks to integrate young learners earlier into the formal structures of primary schooling, emphasising subject knowledge, extended instruction time and uniformity of school form.
Ackesjö and Persson’s (2014) analysis of the schoolarization of the Swedish preschool class provides a valuable backdrop for understanding the institutional discourses that shape teachers’ conceptualizations of literacy and learning. They trace a historical movement from play-based, exploratory pedagogies rooted in early childhood traditions toward increasingly school-oriented, goal-oriented and measurable forms of instruction. Yet, while their analysis foregrounds this temporal development, they also emphasize that these discourses continue to coexist and compete in current preschool-class practice. Teachers thus navigate a pedagogical landscape where the child-centred, socially oriented discourse of exploration and care intersects, and at times conflicts, with a school discourse of instruction, assessment, and accountability. The preschool class still remains a hybrid arena in which the logic of preschool and the logic of primary school meet.
Multimodality and meaning-making in early literacy education
Research on early literacy and writing education increasingly acknowledges that meaning-making in school extends far beyond alphabetic writing. Children’s communicative practices encompass multiple semiotic resources, such as image, gesture, sound, movement, and spatial design, that together shape how they express and negotiate meaning (Bearne, 2009; Kress, 1997; Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006; Pahl, 2009). In educational contexts, this multimodal perspective highlights both the richness of children’s textual worlds and the pedagogical challenge of developing teaching practices that recognize and build upon them. Eve Bearne (2009) argues that literacy education needs a shared discourse and analytical framework for describing multimodal texts. Such a framework must go “beyond the linguistic” (c.f. Jewitt, 2005) to encompass the diverse semiotic modes children use in their text-making. Drawing on Halliday’s social semiotic theory, Bearne emphasizes design as a key concept, connecting intentional meaning-making with the affordances and constraints of different modes. From this perspective, teachers play a crucial role in supporting children’s choices of mode and modal variation in relation to their communicative purposes, Similarly, Pahl (2009) conceptualizes classroom literacy practices as sites of “interactions, intersections, and improvisations,” where children’s multimodal texts emerge in dialogue with teachers, peers, and material artefacts. These interactions reveal how meaning-making is both socially mediated and deeply situated in classroom cultures.
A number of studies have explored how multimodal meaning-making unfolds in early literacy classrooms. Pantaleo (2019), for example, shows how kindergarten children’s visual narratives - rich in colour, gesture, and spatial composition - embody complex storytelling processes that merge affect, imagination, and social understanding. These visual compositions are not mere illustrations but integral components of narrative meaning. Nordström et al. (2021) similarly highlight how affect and joy are central to young children’s literacy practices in multimodal classroom settings, underscoring that multimodal engagement is as much emotional as it is cognitive. Building on these perspectives, research has increasingly emphasized the importance of teachers’ conceptual understandings of multimodality. Hu et al. (2021) demonstrate that teachers’ beliefs about children’s literacy development, particularly their responsiveness to children’s varied meaning-making, mediate how literacy is enacted in classrooms. However, other studies show that such perspectives are not yet fully embedded in classroom practices. Drawing activities, for instance, are often treated as peripheral or recreational rather than as meaning-making acts (Adoniou, 2012; Hall, 2009). As a result, alphabetic writing tends to dominate, while visual and embodied modes remain undervalued (Björk et al., 2025; Kendrick and McKay, 2004; Mackenzie, 2014).
Studies also show how multimodal composing provides a space for children’s agency and identity formation. Kuby and Vaughn (2015) describe how children’s multimodal texts—through drawing, gesture, and embodied performance—serve as acts of becoming, allowing them to explore and position themselves within social worlds. Burke and Boison (2025) similarly highlight how children’s multimodal literacy practices in public and digital spaces function as “cartographies of voice,” making visible the political and affective dimensions of children’s agency. Alvarez (2017), in her study of bilingual children’s drawn and written “funds of knowledge,” underscores how multimodal artefacts bridge home and school literacies, revealing culturally situated experiences that might otherwise remain unacknowledged in monomodal instruction. Collectively, this research indicates that multimodality in literacy education is not merely an issue of adding images or digital tools to writing lessons. Rather, it entails a reconceptualization of literacy pedagogy itself as an endeavor that values diverse semiotic repertoires and situates learning within social, cultural, and affective contexts (Pacheco-Costa and Guman-Simón, 2020; Selander and Danielsson, 2016). When teachers design environments that invite multimodal expression, they also enable dialogic relationships between students, modes, and materials, relationships that expand the very notion of what counts as text and meaning in early schooling (Bearne, 2009; Pahl, 2009; Pantaleo, 2019).
In sum, research across contexts suggests that children’s meaning-making through multimodal resources, whether visual, embodied, or verbal, should be recognized as foundational to literacy learning rather than as ancillary to it. Taken together, this body of research suggests that multimodality matters in early childhood education not only because children use multiple semiotic resources, but because everyday meaning-making itself is fundamentally multimodal. For young children in particular, drawing, gesture, movement, sound, material interaction, and talk constitute central means through which experiences are interpreted and communicated (cf. Björk, 2026). When educational practices narrow literacy toward predominantly alphabetic forms, there is therefore a risk that important communicative, affective, and epistemic dimensions of children’s meaning-making become less visible or pedagogically valued.
Theoretical and methodological framework
This study adopts a qualitative, interpretative research design, aiming to explore how preschool-class teachers understand and conceptualize multimodality in relation to their teaching practices. The analysis is guided by a social-constructivist and interpretivist epistemology, where teachers’ talk is understood as a site for meaning-making rather than as transparent descriptions of practice (Bryman, 2016). The study thus seeks to capture the ways in which multimodality is conceptually negotiated in and through teachers’ narratives about their pedagogical work. Reflexivity has been central throughout the process, as the researchers acknowledge their own theoretical positioning within social semiotic, and dialogic perspectives on communication and literacy, which inevitably shapes the interpretive lens applied to the data (cf. Braun and Clarke, 2006). In this study, Ackesjö and Persson’s (2014) conceptualization of the preschool class as a hybrid pedagogical space shaped by competing preschool and school discourses is used as a sensitizing analytical framework: By examining how teachers attribute epistemic and developmental value to different modes - often positioning verbal and alphabetic language as markers of progress and other modalities (e.g., image, movement, sound) as expressions of sociality or play, the analysis explores how multimodality itself becomes a site where these competing pedagogical discourses are enacted and negotiated. The study is theoretically situated within a social semiotic multimodal theoretical framework (cf. Björk, 2025; Björk et al., 2025), understanding modes (such as images, drawings and writing) as possessing distinct affordances, or potentials, that can interact intermodally within utterances to express meanings and fulfil social functions (Kress, 2003: 39; Martinec and Salway, 2005: 339). These perspectives provide key points of departure for the study’s exploration of how multimodality is negotiated by teachers. Drawing on social constructivist theory, we view teacher’s conceptual negotiations, i.e., how teachers’ talk constitutes and negotiates meanings, are central to understanding the prerequisites for teaching.
Participants and context
Participating teachers, school, years of experience and educational background.
The sample broadly reflects the demographic composition of the Swedish preschool-class workforce, which is predominantly female and strongly shaped by teacher and preschool-teacher professional pathways. Information concerning participants’ racial/ethnic identification was not systematically collected, partly reflecting Swedish research practice concerning demographic categorization.
Data collection
Semi-structured interviews were conducted with each teacher during the fall term of 2024. The interviews lasted between 25 and 46 minutes and were carried out either in person or via digital platforms, depending on geographical location and participant preference. The interview guide included questions about teachers’ understandings of the term multimodality, their experiences of working with different forms of expression and representation in teaching, and their perceptions of how children use multiple modalities in learning. Follow-up questions were used to elicit examples and reflections. All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim using the tool Amberscript. To ensure trustworthiness, the researchers engaged in iterative discussions during the interview phase to refine prompts and ensure alignment with the study’s analytical focus.
Analytic approach
A total of 155 initial codes were generated from the interview transcripts, capturing teachers’ talk about their pedagogical practices, conceptual understandings, and experiences of working with different modes of expression. The coding process followed Braun and Clarke (2006, 2021) model for reflexive thematic analysis, and was both inductive and theoretically informed by a social semiotic and dialogic understanding of communication. During the first phase, codes were descriptive and closely tied to participants’ language, for instance, categories such as drawing as support, different ways of learning, and letter focus. These codes were subsequently reviewed, compared, and clustered to identify patterns of meaning across the dataset. Through a process of interpretive condensation, related codes were merged into broader conceptual groupings, which were iteratively refined through discussion among all three researchers. Throughout this process, reflexivity was central. The research team continually examined how their own theoretical orientation toward multimodality, as communicative, semiotic, and epistemic practice, influenced the interpretation of teachers’ statements. This involved moving analytically between the semantic level of what teachers said and the latent level of how underlying literacy ideologies shaped their perspectives. The collaborative analysis led to the formulation of four overarching themes that encapsulated teachers’ conceptual negotiations of multimodality: (1) Multimodality as familiar yet conceptually elusive, (2) Multimodality in practice: rich enactments and epistemic tensions, (3) Modalities as tools, supports, and values, and (4) Navigating constraints and possibilities. These themes capture how teachers’ accounts shift between intuitive, practice-based understandings and broader institutional discourses of literacy, revealing a profession that enacts multimodality daily yet struggles to articulate its epistemic implications.
Ethical considerations
This study was conducted in accordance with established ethical and legal standards for research involving human participants. All procedures complied with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR, Regulation EU 2016/679), and data were stored securely on GDPR-compliant servers at Mälardalen University. All data were fully anonymized prior to analysis to ensure that no individual participant could be identified. No sensitive personal data or information that could identify individual participants were collected, and therefore, an ethical review was not required under Swedish law. The research however adheres to the ethical principles outlined by the Swedish Research Council (2017). Prior to participation, all participants were provided with detailed information about the study’s aims, procedures, and their rights, including the right to withdraw at any time without consequence. Informed consent was obtained before participation and reconfirmed prior to each interview. At each stage, participants were reminded of the ethical framework guiding the study to ensure transparency and voluntary participation.
Teachers’ conceptual negotiations of multimodality
The following section presents the results of the thematic analysis, organized into four themes that capture how teachers describe, value, and reflect on multimodality in relation to their everyday teaching practices.
Theme 1: Multimodality as familiar yet conceptually elusive
Across the interviews, teachers expressed a general sense of recognition toward the idea of multimodality, yet their understandings were often marked by uncertainty and conceptual vagueness. Several teachers described feeling unfamiliar (ovana) with the term itself, even though the practices it refers to were part of their everyday teaching. When asked how they understood multimodality, many responded tentatively, framing it as: “Different ways that you can ‘shower’ the students in order to build something… But I’ve never heard the word before” (Camilla). “Like, text and image. Together. How they complement each other, maybe. I don’t know.” (Jenny).
Such responses indicate that the term was accessible on a commonsense level but seldom grounded in and articulated theoretical or pedagogical framework. A recurring pattern in the interviews was the close association between text and alphabetic writing. For many teachers, the concept of “text” still primarily referred to written words, while drawings, gestures, movement, or oral language were viewed as complementary or preparatory modes rather than as equally legitimate forms of texts. As one teacher explained, “They have to learn how to hear the sounds of each letter, otherwise writing will be hard later. You have to get this going, with sounds and letters, that’s what’s most important” (Camilla). This perspective reveals a strong alphabetic orientation that continues to structure understandings of literacy, even as multimodal practices are recognized as central to young children’s communication; Camilla continues: “When they don’t know how to write, they can draw […] That’s probably the most common [way of communicating]”.
At the same time, teachers often described how children in the preschool class naturally use multiple modalities, such as drawing, material manipulation (e.g., building blocks or Lego to tell stories), speaking, and moving, to explore and represent ideas. In these accounts, multimodality appeared as something done intuitively in practice rather than conceptualized explicitly as a pedagogical principle. Several teachers acknowledged this gap, noting that while they regularly engage students in multimodal activities, they had not previously reflected on these practices in relation to the concept of multimodality or the curriculum’s emphasis on varied forms of expression. The teachers’ talk thus reveals a tension between scientific discourse and everyday practice. On the one hand, research and theory encourage educators to value diverse modes of communication; on the other, institutional traditions and assessment norms continue to privilege alphabetic literacy as the primary marker of learning. Teachers navigate this terrain by drawing on experiential rather than theoretical understandings, interpreting multimodality through the lens of what they already know and do, rather than as a concept that might challenge their literacy teaching practices and prevailing literacy norms. Kalle states: “I have children who know one letter, who can’t recognize their written name, and I have children who almost read novels for adults - and everything in between. Texts, images, gestures, the verbal. And we sing, the children sing too. And everything is OK. Because we develop in different paces.”
Kalle’s reflection illustrates how teachers acknowledge multimodal forms of expression in practice, yet frame them through an inclusive, experience-based understanding rather than through theoretical or institutional discourses on multimodality. There is on the contrary apparent contestation to a too limited approach to learning to communicate, where one teacher, Bodil, says that: “Not everyone feels good about or is able to learn very much if they just sit there with pen and paper, you know. That’s why we work a lot with different kinds of stations, and we can really see that the students learn more that way. If you have a session with maybe four stations where you do things in different ways, then everyone probably takes something with them each time, instead of only getting what they’re “supposed to” every fourth time we do it.”
In this sense, multimodality emerges as familiar yet conceptually elusive: while teachers like Bodil clearly draw on multimodal practices for pedagogical purposes, such as varying activity types to support diverse learners, they often do so without an explicit theoretical framing of multimodality or of the specific affordances of different modes. Thus, they recognize its presence and value in their classrooms, but may still struggle to articulate what multimodality means conceptually or how particular modes function pedagogically. Their talk reflects an emergent but unsettled conceptual landscape, where multimodality is simultaneously embraced, instrumentalized, and constrained by inherited understandings of what counts as literacy and knowledge in the preschool class.
Theme 2: Multimodality in practice: Rich enactments and epistemic tensions
While teachers often expressed uncertainty about the concept of multimodality, their descriptions of classroom practice revealed a diverse and dynamic range of modal activities. Across the interviews, teachers portrayed the preschool class as a multimodal environment in which children engage in drawing, singing, writing, building, and using their bodies to explore ideas and communicate meanings. Teachers themselves also reported using a variety of modes, such as song (including rhymes and chants), gesture, images, and digital tools, to support engagement and meet their students’ diverse ways of learning. Bea says: “I believe in engaging with what you’re supposed to learn in a variety of ways, because we are all different and take in knowledge in different ways”.
Multimodality, in this sense, appears deeply embedded in the everyday fabric of preschool-class teaching, even if it is not always conceptually named as such. Despite this richness, teachers tended to talk about these different forms of expression as separate activities rather than as interrelated communicative systems. Drawing, bodily movement and crafts were typically understood as creative and communicative work (e.g. Camillas quote), while writing and reading were understood as a technical process running alongside language use (e.g. Solveigs quote): “A combination of creating and practicing writing about what they have created […] Then, as always, we try to include something creative, because they just love to do crafts and cut things out. And… maybe not everyone likes cutting, but, you know, doing crafts, gluing, and making something.” (Camilla). “I follow a certain sequence, maybe like the Bornholm method [a phonics-oriented teaching model], where you start by working a lot with listening. Then you move on to rhymes, then to sentences and words… Then you move on to sounding out and working with different sounds. The first sound, the last sound, the sound in the middle. Letter learning… In parallel, we work on learning the letters while also working with using language” (Solveig).
What stands out in Solveig’s quote is that learning the alphabetic system is not framed as a communicative activity but as a technical process running alongside language use. This distinction suggests that, while multimodal practices are prevalent in early literacy teaching, the alphabetic mode itself is not positioned within the same communicative domain, which is also mirrored by Camilla who makes a distinction between “creating” and “writing about what they have created”. The relationships between modes, for instance, how written symbols might interact with image, talk, or embodied expression, are thus left unexplored in teachers’ accounts. Some teachers also commented on gendered and developmental patterns in children’s modal choices, where one teacher described girls as more inclined toward drawing and crafting, while boys were said to prefer building with blocks and engaging in dramatization using Lego-characters. Others observed that children’s engagement with certain modalities changed over time, for instance as they moved “from drawing to writing” or began combining image and text more purposefully. Such observations reveal that some teachers noticed multimodal (and intermodal) variation, yet they often frame it developmentally or even as gendered, as steps toward mastering alphabetic literacy, rather than as equally valid communicative repertoires.
While teachers expressed nuanced views of multiple modalities as means of communication, their conceptualizations of communicative practice ultimately converged on writing, reading, and alphabetic learning. Teachers frequently described alphabetic literacy as the ultimate destination of children’s engagement in communication in the classroom. Activities involving drawing, movement, or singing, were often justified in terms of how they could support or accompany alphabetic literacy development thus partly understanding such modes of communication as prerequisites or developmental steps toward “real writing”. Multimodality is thus positioned primarily as an instrumental bridge to alphabetic mastery, not as modes of knowledge-building in its own right - which mirrors the patterns identified in Theme 1, namely the privileging of the alphabetic text. This instrumental framing reflects what could be described as an alphabetic hierarchy of modes, where other modalities acquire explicit pedagogical legitimacy mainly through their perceived usefulness for traditional literacy outcomes. At the same time, many teachers expressed a genuine appreciation for the expressive and motivational potential of multimodal activities, often emphasizing their relevance in preschool class, particularly in relation to understanding the communicative experiences children bring with them when entering school. Camilla says: “The most common [modality] is drawing. Because that’s really what it’s more like in these younger years. It’s very much about continuing what they’ve had in preschool. And it’s easy to build that bridge between preschool and school by carrying on with lots and lots of rhymes and songs.”
This seems to bear a contradiction between viewing multimodal practices as valuable in sustaining children’s communicative engagement and simultaneously subordinating them to the goal of alphabetic learning. The teachers frequently observed that children often became most engaged when allowed to move, draw, or dramatize ideas using a variety of modes, and several teachers reflected that some children express themselves best through drawing or dramatizing: “It’s important to include the picture, just as it’s important to include the text. So I encourage that. And then there are those who need iPads, and then they get to write on that. If they need to tell it orally, well, then they get to do that. I mean, yes — it’s quite individual, really.” (Annika). “But we also use the body a lot… having them act things out. We sing… But it’s really the drawing that we always come back to.” (Bonnie).
Yet these insights are rarely translated into a reconceptualization of multimodality as epistemic - that is, as a way of thinking and expressing knowledge. In practice, multimodality tends to be understood through a pedagogy of communicating needs and support rather than a pedagogy of meaning and knowledge, while at the same time being prevalent in the pedagogical practices.
Taken together, these patterns indicate that multimodality in the preschool-class is vividly enacted but only partially theorized and epistemically appreciated. The teachers’ accounts show classrooms saturated with multimodal engagement, yet this diversity is often practiced more than it is conceptualized or epistemically understood. Multimodal activity thus coexists with an enduring alphabetic orientation, producing a pedagogical landscape that is at once rich, creative, but communicatively ambiguous and hierarchically structured around writing as the epistemically privileged mode and pedagogical goal.
Theme 3: Modalities as tools, supports, and values
Teachers’ descriptions of multimodal work often revolved around what different modalities do for children’s learning. They attributed a wide range of purposes, functions, and values to modes such as drawing, writing, singing, bodily movement, and speech. In many accounts, modalities were positioned as pedagogical tools that help children express themselves, remember content, or approach literacy learning in an accessible way. Drawing, for instance, was frequently described as a supportive activity, something children could do when words weren’t “enough”. Anna and Annika explains: “Some get a bit tired of it, but I want them to keep drawing even when they’ve learned to write. Because I think it provides support. It gives them more time to think about what they want to show, what they want to communicate. When they both draw and write, the picture makes them think one step further about what they want to express.” (Anna). “It [drawing] serves pretty much the same function as the written part, you could say. For example, when we’re working with autumn, they draw an autumn picture in this book, and then after a month or so we can flip back through the book and have a conversation about that picture and the drawing — just as we could have a conversation about what they’ve written.” (Annika).
This understanding reflects a view of intermodality as a sort of cross-pollination, where one mode may aid in a developed understanding of the functional uses of another. While this may be viewed as an instrumental view of drawing as a pathway to developed alphabetical literacy, it is simultaneously acknowledging the scaffolding affordances of drawings in a dialogic interplay between modes. The aforementioned instrumental orientation was particularly visible in talk about the relationship between image/drawing and alphabetic text. Teachers described how drawing could function as a scaffold, a tool for visualization, or a means of compensating for various difficulties with language - of not “having the language” (“inte ha språket”). Similarly, modalities such as singing, dancing and bodily movement were valued for their capacity to support the process of creating text, letter recognition, and phonologic awareness: “We’ve done some dance, letter dance and writing dance, working in different ways to reach the process of text creation.” (Bonnie). “For example, when we practice the alphabet, I might ask: can you show a specific letter? Can you show the letter T with your body? How does a T look? Can you make an S on the mat? Or make a B with a friend?” (Kalle). “Many kinds of language games … what they’re supposed to learn, for instance language, the first language sounds, rhymes, that letter, and through play they can consolidate what they’ve learned.” (Solveig).
These accounts highlight how multimodal engagement was often justified through its contribution to linguistic or cognitive outcomes, but also to aesthetic values and a sense of enjoyment. At the same time, the interviews also revealed movements beyond the instrumental; of alternative valuation, where modalities were described as valuable in their own right. Some teachers emphasized the aesthetic and affective dimensions of expression, referring to the importance of joy, emotion, and bodily engagement in learning. Others spoke about the intrinsic value (egenvärde) of children’s creative work - that various modalities were not just preparatory stages or scaffolding resources of alphabetic literacy development, but meaningful experiences of communication, closely associated to preferences and experiences of the individual child. Camilla reflected: “I like using different forms of expression… it’s different from day to day, from group to group, depending on what we do. As many ways as possible, because they’re all so different. They learn differently…”
Notably, Camilla here points to the role of multimodality as an aspect of learning. To a question of what the primary purpose is of literacy teaching in preschool class is, Hanna gives the following answer: “That it should be fun and joyful, and that they shouldn’t feel there’s a right or wrong or any pressure about it. There are no demands that they have to be able to do this or that. Instead, it should feel like they’re curious and want to know more, and that it feels enjoyable. When they’re looking forward to Monday over the weekend because a new “sound character” will be introduced. That they actually long for school. That’s something you hope will last, that they won’t lose.”
These voices point toward a more expansive understanding of literacy as creative and meaningful. Together, the coexistence of instrumental and more intrinsic perspectives of modalities forms a central tension in the data. Teachers navigate between multimodality as a means to an end - a set of tools for supporting traditional literacy - and multimodality as ways of knowing and being in the world. The former aligns with institutional expectations and assessment traditions; the latter gestures toward a broader conception of learning as multimodal and dialogic - resonating with individual sense of meaning and communicative purposes (c.f. Ackesjö and Persson, 2014).
Overall, this theme illustrates how teachers’ talk about multimodality is imbued with value judgments about what counts as legitimate learning and expression - oscillating between an institutional/traditional view of literacy development, and an understanding of literacy encompassing communicative and aesthetic affordances of many different modes; one difference being that the latter is less theorized and more related to accounts of experiences with working with preschool-class students. Teachers’ reflections reveal both the persistence of instrumental logic and more holistic, meaning-oriented orientations toward multimodal communication.
Theme 4: Navigating constraints and possibilities
Although teachers described the preschool-class as rich in multimodal activity, they also spoke extensively about the practical and institutional constraints that shape what is possible to do. Many highlighted challenges such as limited time, large groups, scarce materials, and insufficient access to digital tools. Some pointed to a lack of collegial support or professional development concerning multimodal approaches, noting that incorporating various materials for crafts or drawing builds on their professional experiences rather than professional development. This is also the case for using digital tools. Bonnie and Bodil says: “I feel that I personally have too little knowledge about that, and I’m not very familiar with it - and I don’t think my team is either. So I’d say I have a knowledge gap there. (Bonnie). “Yes, I miss the digital [dimension]. But it’s the same throughout the whole municipality - it’s a bit behind digitally.” (Bodil).
Here, digital resources are described as a constraint, not only through a lack of familiarity, but through municipal priorities. Other teachers mentioned the difficulty of sustaining children’s motivation or managing the classroom when activities involved multiple materials and expressive modes. These challenges often led teachers to simplify multimodal activities or focus more narrowly on those that were manageable within existing structures, primarily drawing.
Another recurring perspective concerned the broader institutional and curricular pressures that frame the preschool-class environment. Teachers described the preschool-class as a bridge between the play-based culture of preschool and the more formal, goal-oriented culture of compulsory schooling. This transitional role was experienced as both enabling and constraining. Here, multimodal work was seen as a natural continuation of preschool practices, not least drawing. As Olle remarked: “I think that when they come to school, it’s not at all certain that they know what’s expected of them. There are many expectations and dilemmas for them. They have to both meet what they bring from before and decode what we want from them. It becomes a way of trying to figure out the task. […] Before they’ve really grasped what school is, what’s required of them… if you lower that demand a bit, things often loosen up for them, and drawing becomes a very natural way for most of them to express themselves.”
Olle further voices a recurring theme among the teachers - school readiness and how children meet new demands on schooling. Several teachers linked these tensions to broader political and organizational decisions, such as resource allocation, but also to the increasing focus on alphabetic writing. To a question of what is most important when welcoming students to preschool class, Bea answers: “That I see the students, every student, every individual […] But then I think that I wish I could divide them up a bit more. The ones who can really read […] And then that everyone gets the level of challenge they need to keep developing […] I’m also thinking of my own son, who could both read and write [when he started preschool class] And then they started with letter learning. And then they did it again in first grade. And he said to me, bluntly: “Mom, I’m so damn tired of writing H.”
Bea’s reflection captures, perhaps unintentionally, the tension inherent in an overly standardized approach to early literacy. Her son’s exasperation - “so damn tired of writing H” - encapsulates the broader dilemma teachers describe: when curricular uniformity meets children’s diverse literacy trajectories, repetition risks replacing progression. The comment wryly illustrates how the alphabetic norm, meant to ensure equity, can instead flatten variation; turning early writing from an exploratory practice into an exercise in endurance. At the same time, the interviews also contained expressions of possibility. Some teachers envisioned their practice by introducing new materials, digital tools (the lack thereof was primarily understood as an economic constraint of the school), or other forms of expression. Others emphasized the importance of multimodality for inclusion, arguing that it allows every child to participate in their own way. Such comments point to teachers’ agency and creativity in navigating institutional constraints, as well as their awareness of multimodality’s democratic and accessibility-related dimensions - while not necessarily aware of what the term multimodality encompasses.
Discussion
The findings of this study highlight a paradox at the heart of literacy teaching in the Swedish preschool-class: teachers’ practices are multimodal and communicatively diverse, yet their conceptual framings of literacy remain anchored in an alphabetic epistemology. In other words, teachers’ everyday work is steeped in multimodal engagement, such as drawing, movement, gesture, sound, play, and digital exploration, where modalities are not least connected to perceived pedagogic affordances. Teachers talk about learning and communication however continue to explicitly privilege the alphabetic mode as the principal site of knowledge and educational legitimacy. This tension between enacted multimodality and conceptual monomodality reveals both the pedagogical richness and the epistemic limitations that characterize the preschool-class as a transitional educational space.
Multimodality as the lived texture of teaching
The teachers’ accounts depict classroom work as inherently multimodal. Lessons integrate song, bodily movement, digital exploration, and above all, drawing. These practices are not peripheral embellishments to “real” instruction but rather constitute the everyday material and communicative fabric of the preschool-class. Teachers seem to move seamlessly between modes: singing the alphabet, gesturing emotion, drawing narratives, dramatizing ideas, without necessarily labeling these acts as multimodal pedagogy. This finding echoes social semiotic perspectives (Kress, 2010; Selander and Danielsson, 2016) emphasizing that teaching itself is always a multimodal enterprise: meaning is made through ensembles of resources, not through words alone.
Yet, the teachers’ fluency in multimodal practice contrasts with their uncertainty about the concept and epistemic affordances of multimodality. As shown, most had not encountered the term, and several described their knowledge as intuitive or experiential. This suggests that teachers “do” multimodality more than they “theorize” it. The absence of a shared metalanguage (cf. Bearne, 2009; Macken-Horarik, 2008) for talking about modes and meaning-making appears to limit their capacity to articulate the epistemic and pedagogical potentials of these practices. Consequently, multimodality tends to be framed in pragmatic rather than epistemological terms, something one uses to motivate, scaffold, or support learning rather than a way of knowing and thinking.
Children’s communicative repertoires: Drawing as hinge and hub
Children’s communicative repertoires in the preschool-class emerge as equally multimodal. Teachers recurrently describe how children combine talk, gesture, construction, and digital play to express ideas. However, drawing holds a particularly central position; serving as both a bridge from preschool practices and a hub around which other modes circulate. Drawing appears as a natural medium for exploration and narration, a site where children connect emotion, imagination, and knowledge. Teachers often spoke with affection and respect about the role of drawing, describing it, in Bonnie’s words, as “what we always come back to.”
At the same time, drawing is frequently positioned as a preparatory or supportive mode, as a complement or stepping stone toward writing rather than an epistemic act in its own right. This instrumentalization echoes earlier research (Adoniou, 2012; Hall, 2009; Mackenzie, 2014) showing that drawing is often valued for its scaffolding function but rarely recognized as an autonomous mode of meaning-making (Hort et al., 2026). The teachers’ accounts thus reveal a kind of curricular ambivalence: while they perceive children’s drawings as rich communicative acts, institutional discourses seem to render them pedagogically subordinate. This hierarchy of modes, where alphabetic writing remains the ultimate goal, risks obscuring our understanding of how children actually construct knowledge and communicate understanding through image, gesture, and material engagement in the classroom.
The epistemic alphabetic norm
The persistence of what may be called an epistemic alphabetic norm, that is the implicit assumption that written language is the primary carrier of knowledge, permeates teachers’ talk. The alphabetic system seems to be taught as a technical system alongside communication; multimodal communication, by contrast, is assumed rather than taught. In this sense, the alphabetic mode retains epistemic privilege: it is not only the measure of literacy but the very definition of what counts as knowledge in school. Other modes, such as image, sound, bodily movement, are allowed pedagogical presence, yet not epistemological weight.
This finding aligns with earlier analyses of “monomodal literacy ideologies” (Björk, 2025; Jewitt, 2008; Kress, 1997), which argue that the dominance of the alphabetic mode in schooling is not simply practical but conceptual. It organizes hierarchies of meaning, determining which representational forms are considered legitimate demonstrations of understanding. Within this framework, the teachers’ frequent justification of multimodal activities through their contribution to phonological awareness or alphabetic learning appears symptomatic rather than incidental.
Bea’s humorous account of her son: “Mom, I’m so damn tired of writing H”, captures this dilemma succinctly. Her story, while anecdotal, underscores how curricular uniformity and the alphabetic norm can flatten individual trajectories of learning, turning variation and curiosity into monotony. It is a small but telling example of how institutional logics can transform exploration into endurance. This study’s findings thus point to a disjuncture between practice and conceptualization. Teachers’ daily work abounds with multimodal acts that engage children’s senses, emotions, and imaginations. Yet, their interpretive frameworks constrain how these acts are understood and valued. Rather than reflecting an individual deficit among teachers, this conceptual gap may be understood as a product of broader institutional and professional conditions. Teachers operate within educational traditions, curricular framings, teacher education histories, and policy environments that continue to privilege alphabetic literacy as the primary marker of knowledge and progression. Within such conditions, multimodal practices may be enacted extensively in classrooms without being equally supported by shared professional languages for theorizing their epistemic role. This conceptual gap matters. As Kress (2010) reminds us, each mode offers distinct affordances for representing experience. When such affordances are under-theorized in teaching, the school risks overlooking how children actually make meaning. Ironically, this oversight occurs precisely in classrooms where teachers see and appreciate children’s multimodal expression, especially drawing, but operate within professional and institutional discourses that do not always provide robust conceptual resources for treating such expression as epistemically viable alongside alphabetic writing.
Toward a pedagogy of multimodal epistemic plurality and the schoolarization of preschool-class
The analysis invites reflection on what might be gained from moving beyond the alphabetic hierarchy toward a pedagogy of multimodal epistemic plurality. Such a pedagogy would recognize that children’s multimodal compositions are not ancillary to learning but fundamental to how knowledge is constructed, embodied, and communicated. It would also require developing a shared professional language that enables teachers to describe, assess, and discuss multimodal meaning-making as learning, not merely as support or decoration. In policy terms, this implies that curricular frameworks and teacher education should more explicitly articulate multimodality as an epistemic and communicative concept, not only as a matter of “varied expression.” Without such articulation, multimodal practice remains conceptually invisible, despite being pedagogically ubiquitous.
This study points to the need for continued dialogue between theoretical research on multimodality and the professional realities of teachers. The preschool-class represents a particularly generative space for this dialogue because it sits at the threshold of play and school, creativity and curriculum, image and word. Teachers working here are already negotiating multimodality daily, often with resourcefulness, ingenuity and care. What remains insufficiently recognized within broader professional and policy discourses is that the multimodal richness teachers orchestrate is not a prelude to literacy, but literacy itself.
The findings of this study can be further understood through Ackesjö and Persson’s (2014) analysis of the schoolarization of the Swedish preschool class. Their work traces a policy-driven transformation in which the preschool class has gradually been reoriented from a socially and play-based pedagogical tradition toward increasingly school-oriented, goal-driven, and measurable forms of instruction. From a Bernsteinian perspective (e.g. Bernstein, 2000), this tension can also be seen as the result of shifting pedagogic discourses, in which the recontextualization of knowledge privileges certain modes and practices, particularly linguistic and measurable ones, while subordinating others associated with play and exploration. While Ackesjö and Persson describe this shift as a temporal process, they also emphasize that the resulting pedagogical field remains discursively hybrid: preschool and school logics continue to coexist and compete in current practice. The preschool class thereby constitutes an institutional and epistemic in-between space in which teachers must continually negotiate what counts as learning, knowledge, and appropriate pedagogy.
This discursive tension is clearly visible in the teachers’ talk about multimodality. Verbal and alphabetic language are consistently associated with learning, development, and measurable progression - central tropes of the school discourse - whereas other modes, such as image, movement, sound, or material engagement, are more often (but not entirely) framed as belonging to the domain of play, affect, and social interaction. In this sense, multimodality itself becomes a site where competing pedagogical ideologies are enacted: the school discourse privileges linguistic modes as epistemic, while the preschool discourse values multimodal engagement as social and emotional - but also pedagogical. Teachers’ reflections reveal how these orientations coexist within their professional repertoires, producing hybrid understandings of multimodality as both instrumental support for literacy and as intrinsic to communication and joy.
Interpreted through Ackesjö and Persson’s lens, these tensions can be read as a microcosm of the broader schoolarization process. The teachers’ conceptual hierarchies, where writing and verbal language are seen as signs of maturity and other modes as developmental or affective complements, mirror the ongoing restructuring of early childhood education toward school norms of accountability and progression. Yet, within the same talk, counter-discourses emerge. When teachers ascribe aesthetic, affective, or inclusive value to multimodal expression, they implicitly challenge the dominance of the alphabetic norm and sustain fragments of the preschool pedagogy that has defined the preschool class. Recognizing and theorizing multimodality as an epistemic rather than developmental resource may therefore serve as an important counter-discourse to the continued schoolarization of early literacy education.
As the current preschool-class is transformed into a formal first school year, there is a risk that the epistemic alphabetic norm (and schoolarization) identified here may be further entrenched if curricular and professional frameworks continue to privilege alphabetic literacy as the primary index of learning. Taken together, the practices described by the teachers may be understood as intermediary, serving both to sustain the multimodal epistemologies of preschool and to scaffold children into the alphabetic epistemology awaiting them in primary school. Yet, as the 10-year primary school reform moves forward, there is a clear risk that this intermediary space will narrow: the first year of primary school may increasingly privilege alphabetic ways of knowing, which in turn could push the preparatory function of preschool toward earlier and more exclusive emphasis on alphabetic skills at the expense of its broader, multimodal foundations. A genuinely future-oriented reform would invest in cultivating teachers’ recognition, theorization, and design for multimodal communicative practices in the first school year. Such investment cannot, however, rest on teachers alone. Teacher education, school leadership, curriculum design, policy frameworks, and professional development structures also bear responsibility for creating conditions in which multimodal and epistemically plural approaches can be recognized, legitimized, and sustained in early literacy education. Doing so would align the lived multimodal realities of children’s meaning-making (e.g., Kress and Jewitt, 2003) with the epistemic values of schooling, supporting a literacy pedagogy grounded in epistemic plurality rather than alphabetic uniformity.
Conclusion
This study has explored how teachers in the Swedish preschool class understand and conceptualize multimodality in relation to teaching, literacy, and children’s learning during a period of educational reform. The findings suggest a recurring tension between multimodality as lived pedagogical practice and multimodality as conceptual and epistemic framework. Teachers described classrooms rich in drawing, movement, song, gesture, play, and varied forms of communication, yet their accounts simultaneously revealed the enduring influence of an alphabetic epistemology in which writing and verbal language tend to function as the primary markers of learning and educational legitimacy. Multimodality was often enacted intuitively and valued pragmatically, while less frequently articulated as a theory of meaning-making or as a way of knowing in its own right.
Rather than interpreting this tension as an individual limitation among teachers, the study suggests that it reflects broader institutional and professional conditions surrounding early literacy education. Teachers work within curricular traditions, assessment cultures, policy reforms, and professional discourses that have historically privileged alphabetic literacy, even in educational settings where multimodal meaning-making is pervasive. The findings therefore point not only to the importance of supporting teachers’ professional language for discussing multimodal learning, but also to the shared responsibility of teacher education, school leadership, curriculum development, and educational policy in recognizing and legitimizing multimodal epistemologies in early childhood education.
The preschool class emerges in this study as a particularly revealing educational space because of its intermediary position between preschool and compulsory school. As the Swedish preschool class is transformed into the first year of a 10-year compulsory school, questions concerning what counts as literacy, communication, and knowledge in early education become increasingly consequential. The findings indicate that the ongoing reform may risk reinforcing alphabetic norms unless multimodal forms of meaning-making are more explicitly theorized and institutionally supported as central dimensions of literacy education.
The study also has several limitations that should be acknowledged. The findings are based on semi-structured interviews with 16 teachers and capture teachers’ conceptual accounts rather than direct observations of classroom practice. The interviews, ranging from 25 to 46 minutes, reflect pragmatic considerations related to teacher workload and research access, but may have limited opportunities for deeper elaboration and sustained reflection. A longitudinal or dialogic design involving follow-up conversations, collaborative reflection, or classroom observation could have generated richer insights into how teachers’ understandings develop over time and how multimodality is negotiated in practice. Future research may therefore benefit from combining interview-based approaches with observational, participatory, or design-oriented methodologies that allow teachers’ conceptualizations and pedagogical enactments to be explored in closer relation.
Despite these limitations, the study contributes to research on multimodality and early literacy by foregrounding teachers’ professional voices within a context currently undergoing substantial policy transformation. The findings suggest that multimodality in the preschool class is not marginal or supplementary to literacy education; rather, it constitutes part of the everyday communicative texture through which children learn, express meaning, and engage with school. Recognizing, theorizing, and institutionally supporting this multimodal richness remains an important challenge – and possibility – for future early literacy education.
Footnotes
Ethical considerations
The study complied with the ethical principles outlined by the Swedish Research Council (2017) and the General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation EU 2016/679). According to Swedish legislation, the research did not require formal ethical clearance, as no sensitive personal data were collected.
Consent to participate
All participants were provided with written and verbal information about the study’s aims and procedures and gave informed consent prior to participation.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Data Availability Statement
Due to the qualitative nature of the data and to protect participant anonymity, interview transcripts are not publicly available.