Reading Gender in Early Childhood: Schemas, Scripts, and the Multimodal Shaping of Children’s Lived Performances

Gender remains a significant yet often subtle dimension of literacy in early childhood education and care (ECEC). Picturebooks and digital texts may introduce young children to patterned cues about how gender is seen, valued, and enacted, sometimes reinforcing binary expectations even when such messages are not explicit. This paper considers how children may encounter and interpret gender through schemas, scripts, and multimodal features embedded in the texts they read and the literacy practices they participate in. Drawing on insights from picturebook scholarship, cognitive studies, queer theory, and childhood studies, the discussion explores how gender may be shaped through repeated visual, verbal, and affective cues that children learn to recognise and respond to. At the same time, a growing body of inclusive and counter-normative texts may offer opportunities for children to expand or adjust their existing understandings of gender, although such shifts are often partial and dependent on context, mediation, and broader cultural messages. By approaching literacy as an embodied, relational, and multimodal experience, this paper aims to open a reflective space for considering how early literacy practices may support more diverse and expansive possibilities for gender in ECEC settings.