Graphical models are commonly used by primary school teachers and pupils in early literacy teaching to represent different story elements of narrative text. Using Design for learning (DfL) (Björklund Boistrup & Selander, 2022; Selander & Kress, 2021) as a framework, this PhD project explores how such models 1) pertain to Swedish policy documents of early primary school teaching (Ridell & Walldén, 2023), 2) how teachers design and orchestrate teaching in a formal school setting (Ridell & Walldén, 2024), 3) how pupils potentially re-design the use of models in their writing processes (Ridell, 2024) and 4) which story elements, and through which means of written representation, are acknowledged by teachers as parts of a written story in a formal school setting of literacy teaching (Ridell & Walldén, in progress).

Various concepts from DfL have been employed in the process of studying these perspectives in different part-studies of the project. Using transcribed video and audio data from classroom activities and follow-up interviews with teachers and pupils along with continuous documentation of their produced texts and models, the social dimensions within key perspectives of Design for Learning are explored – design for learning (DD1), design in learning (DD2) and acknowledging signs of learning (DD3).

In the presentation, I share how this theoretical framework has shaped my research design and how the different perspectives have been incorporated in different substudies across the field of early literacy teaching, combined with other multimodal social semiotics (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2020) and educational sociological perspectives (Bernstein, 1990, 2000). I will show how the graphical design of a model can align or deviate from curriculum phrasings, how teachers’ different orchestrations of a model shift the literacy focus of explicit teaching, how pupils re-design character dialogue in their narrative writing to realise suspense-building in their stories and how teachers use broad metaphorical meta-language, such as “descriptions” and “red thread” when assessing pupils’ written stories and acknowledging verbal passages as representations of these story elements.