This study investigates the physical literacy environment of preschools in three Nordic countries. The environments were assessed using an observation protocol in a total of 131 classrooms with children aged between one and seven in Sweden, Norway and Finland. The results showed that children’s books were common and accessible in all three countries. Half of the preschools had a writing centre, and digital devices were available in less than half of them. Multilingual children were present in 82% of the classrooms, but texts and books in the multilingual children’s first languages were rare. Taken together, the results suggest that children’s books were the main gateway to literacy in these preschools, while artefacts supporting writing skills and digital literacy were less common. The findings indicate that the physical environment in these preschools did not reflect the ongoing societal changes towards increased multimodal literacy.

This study investigates the use of dance and visual arts in poetry education by systematically reviewing peer‐reviewed articles published on the topic from 2000 to 2019. The review focuses on empirical results in studies concerned with using dance and visual arts in poetry education and implications for poetry pedagogy in research and practice. The review encompasses 21 articles that were analysed thematically. The thematic analysis yielded seven themes: expand and deepen understandings of poetry; break curricular boundaries; interaction and collaboration; personal knowledge, reflection and experience; increase interest, motivation and confidence; challenges, limitations and constraints; and disciplinary knowledge. With research on this topic having increased in the 2010s, the findings show the potentials and challenges of using dance and visual arts in different ways in poetry education. Still, the research field is understudied, and many questions remain unanswered. Consequently, this study concludes with suggestions for future research on arts‐based responses in poetry education. The study adds to the dialogue on poetry education and contributes to raising awareness of the possibilities and challenges of using dance and visual arts in the poetry classroom.

Students seem to encounter various challenges when writing bachelor’s and master’s theses, indicating a need to support them in their writing processes. In this study, academic writing workshops for students writing bachelor’s and master’s theses were developed and investigated during three years of a participatory action research project. The study uses a more-than-human approach to students’ thesis writing to explore how academic writing workshop practices are produced. Based on diffractive analytical engagements, this study conceptualizes the workshop practices as the enactment of academic writing workshop-ing in the spacetimemattering of the workshops. The workshop-ing recognizes the workshops as active doings with students and writing tutors in social and material realities; workshop-ing is an enacted practice, rather than preexistent or preceding. The study contributes to the existing literature with insights about how different entanglements matter in thesis writing practices and how workshop-ing can become productive in supporting students’ thesis writing.

This study explored the pedagogical implications of integrating creative dance into fifth-grade students’ poetry reading and writing within the context of an educational design research project. Two teaching designs were developed and implemented by a researcher, a dance teaching artist, and two primary school teachers during two research cycles (the academic year of 2018–2019). Thinking with new materialism, a diffractive analysis was used to identify performative agents that make a difference in students’ meaning-making processes. When dance was integrated, it became entangled with the poetry in students’ meaning-making processes. The boundaries between reading, writing, and dancing became fluid, enhancing the attention to the materiality, relationality, and embodiment of the students’ reading and writing processes. These results demonstrate that dance integration has the pedagogical potential to deepen and broaden the meaning-making in poetry reading and writing. This article therefore concludes by presenting some recommendations for how to integrate creative dance into first language and literature education.