Beyond words: Teachers’ conceptual negotiation of multimodality and early literacy in Swedish preschool class

Participants and context

The data consists of interviews with sixteen preschool-class teachers working at four schools across Sweden. The participating schools represent diverse local contexts in terms of geography and socio-economic composition, encompassing a range from urban to rural environments from across Sweden. The schools are categorised (see Table 1) on a socio-economic scale (Boverket/Swedish National Board of Housing, Building and Planning, n.d.) ranging from areas with socio-economic challenges (School A), socio-economically mixed areas (School B), areas with favourable socio-economic conditions (Schools C and G), and areas with very favourable socio-economic conditions (Schools D, E and F). Teachers varied in education backgrounds, professional roles and years of experience outlined in Table 1. The selection aimed not for statistical representativeness, but for conceptual variation - to capture a broad range of understandings and practices related to multimodality within the Swedish preschool-class context, which serves as a bridge between preschool and compulsory schooling.

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Table 1.

Participating teachers, school, years of experience and educational background.

ID	School	Years of experience	Educational background
Olle	A	6	Preschool teacher education
Anna	B	37 (26 in preschool class)	Preschool teacher education
Annika	B	12	After school teacher education (extra teacher training “lärarlyftet”)
Kalle	C	28	Teacher education
Solveig	C	32 (17 in preschool class)	Preschool teacher education
Hanna	D	26	Preschool teacher education
Jenny	D	7	Teacher education
Marianne	D	22	Preschool teacher education
Camilla	D	37 (18 in preschool class)	Teacher education
Ida	D	23	After school teacher education (extra teacher training “lärarlyftet”)
Bodil	E	17	Preschool teacher education
Bonnie	E	22	Preschool teacher education
Bea	E	21	Preschool teacher education
Nina	F	40 (13 in preschool class)	Preschool teacher education
Pia	G	17 (8 in preschool class)	Teacher education
Petra	G	20	Teacher education

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.

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).

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).

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).

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).

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).

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).

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.

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.