This article is based on research in a United States second-grade classroom during a multimodal literacy workshop. Observing students working with tissue paper, foam board, string, pipe cleaners and other materials, we asked how is intra-activity with materials, time and space influencing literacy learning in Room 203? While the research partnership of the authors spanned four years, video and audio recordings, artefacts and interviews with children for this article focus on year two of the research. Poststructural enquiry methods of pedagogical documentation and thinking with theory were used for data production and analysis. Pedagogical documentation focuses not only on the expected ways of being and learning (in this case, the norms of writing in an early childhood classroom) but also on unexpected occurrences (departures from what is typical or developmental) when students write. Thinking with poststructural and posthumanist theories allowed us to explore time, space and materials with three ideas: departures from the expected, the notion of becoming and intra-activity with materials. We illustrate how intra-activity with materials, time and space manifested in two projects: a 3D birdhouse and a 19-foot giraffe mural. We encourage educators to consider how expanded definitions of writing that include intra-actions with a range of materials create learning opportunities for children to live out literacy desiring with multimodal artefacts.

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In this article, the authors (re)think writing as an ethical endeavor to explore and to cultivate more inclusive orientations for writing research and teaching. Situated in posthumanist scholarship on intra-activity, trans-corporeality, and translingual assemblages, they provide data–theory encounters that resist the privileging of alphabetic print, standardized written English approaches to writing pedagogies that have detached writers from the contextual doing/being/feeling demanded of composing-with-all-bodies. Data in the article are drawn from three separate research projects. Diffractively reading data through posthumanist theoretical concepts, the authors highlight the tensions and insights produced from their analysis to provoke an ethico-onto-epistemological shift in writing studies and classroom pedagogies, and to enliven the ethical work of exploring and cultivating more inclusive orientations to writing research and teaching.

Consciously or not, we educators and educational researchers are used to looking at schools as places where humans dwell together to learn what it means to be human and to accumulate the kinds of skills and habits required to participate in human societies as adults. This occurs in spite of the fact that schools are connected with the nonhuman world in so many explicit and implicit ways.. .we are not the center of the universe. Indeed, we should not be the center of conversation.

This cross-case qualitative study draws on poststructural notions of identity to explore the relationship between multimodal literacies of young children and their becoming identities. Although research focuses on the products or texts of multiliteracies, more research is needed to examine shifting identities in the process of students creating. This study uses mediated discourse analysis to analyse interactions across one school year in a kindergarten (five-and six-year-olds) and a second-grade (seven-and eightyear-olds) classroom. Four insights are discussed across cases: (1) understanding and recognition of shifting identities, (2) the children becoming and doing teacher, (3) being a multimodal visionary and (4) living as a mentor designer and teacher. Insights highlight a 'multimodal as agency' stance, suggesting that through the process of creating multimodal forms of literacy, positions were instantiated and identities were re/negotiated. We encourage early childhood educators to create multimodal curricular spaces to facilitate young children's agency and becoming identities.