Early childhood teachers making multiliterate learning environments: The emergence of a spatial design thinking process

Abstract Globally, a critical debate about multiliteracies’ teaching in early childhood education is intensifying. Teachers and researchers worldwide are rethinking ‘multiliteracies pedagogy’ and ‘multiliterate learning environments’ to design innovative and meaningful educational spaces for young children. They pursue to better account for the role (and entanglement) of spaces, places, materiality, bodies, and power in early childhood education pedagogies. Multiliterate learning environments research offers the possibility to reconceptualize early childhood classrooms as real sites of thinking revolution and unique spaces for theorizing new contours of literacy pedagogy. This study explored and elicited early childhood teachers’ thinking and making multiliterate learning environments, with an ethnographic approach. We designed a single-case study emplaced in a university’s laboratory preschool. The participant observation took place for five months and had two different outspreading moments. First, to explore and familiarize with the preschool culture and to penetrate the learning environment codes, and the second, to produce ethnographic data collaboratively with in-depth interviews. Findings show that teachers’ design thinking process is culturally situated and ‘child interest- driven,’ enabling some child agency in spatial meaning-making as co-authors of the multiliterate learning environments they inhabit. The design thinking process unfolds through an ongoing iterative and collaborative four-phased-cycle. Teachers ideate and reflect on multiliteracies and place-making decisions that materialize learning environments based on the world of children. While making multiliterate environments through this spatial design thinking process, teachers are empowered as designers and as makers of a ‘third teacher,’ where a wide-ranging diversity of people, texts, practices, meanings, and cultural contexts intersect to build communication.