Embodied Historical Sensemaking in Early Childhood: Multimodal Inquiry with Primary Sources

This study examines how preschool children engaged in embodied and multimodal historical sensemaking through inquiry with visual cultural heritage materials, including archival photographs, maps, and AI -remixed visual provocations. Drawing on design-based qualitative research in preschool classrooms, the study explores how wonder-oriented pedagogies supported children’s engagement with primary sources. Findings reveal that children participated in sophisticated historical interpretation through gesture, dramatization, movement, collaborative dialogue, drawing, collage, mapping, construction, and visual remixing. Rather than treating historical images as static representations of the past, children approached them as interpretive and speculative spaces for exploring emotion, environmental change, social relationships, and possible futures. Embodiment and multimodality functioned as central interpretive resources, with meaning emerging through interactions among bodies, materials, technologies, images, and collaborative inquiry. The study contributes to visual pedagogy, cultural heritage inquiry, and early childhood education by positioning young children as capable interpreters of historical worlds through wonder, sensory exploration, and imaginative reconstruction.