Barnehagens garderobe som semiotisk landskap – og et sted for barns literacy?

The study investigates the kindergarten cloakroom as a semiotic landscape and an arena for children’s literacy development. The study aims to both increase the understanding of the cloakroom’s role in children’s everyday learning and to discuss how kindergarten teachers can involve children in text production to strengthen their literacy skills. The research questions are: 1) In what ways is it possible facilitate spontaneous and what we would call exploratory literacy in the cloakroom? 2) How can kindergarten teachers involve children in the production of texts and give children’s texts space in the semiotic landscape that the cloakroom represents?

The results show that the cloakroom serves as a complex semiotic landscape dominated by staff-produced texts that mainly perform communicative actions such as organisation and directing. The children’s contribution to the semiotic landscape is largely invisible, with child-produced texts often limited to individual shelves and not receiving a central place in the cloakroom’s text landscape. The study points to the need to include children in text production in order to utilise the cloakroom’s potential as a literacy-developing arena. It is also a paradox that a room where children spend a lot of time does not reflect their voices and texts to a greater extent.

Data material consists of 1101 photographs of texts in 13 different kindergarten cloakrooms, combined with responsive interviews with pedagogical leaders in the relevant departments. The photographic and interview material was analysed through a hermeneutic process in which each image was encoded and analysed based on social-semiotic theory. The study focused on how various semiotic resources were used in cloakroom texts, as well as their communicative functions such as organisation, documentation, directing, and promotion.

Munch, C. B. Ø., Semundseth, M. & Hopperstad, M. H. (2022). Barnehagens garderobe som semiotisk landskap – og et sted for barns literacy? Nordic Journal of Literacy Research, 8(2), 24–43.