The aim of the licentiate project is to investigate how teaching in sloyd can provide space for aesthetic expression as a communicative and didactic resource. Sloyd (slöjd in Swedish) is a craft subject included in the compulsory education system in Nordic countries. The multimodal communication of sloyd has been examined in previous research from different perspectives: how materials, tools and spaces interact and contribute to learning in teaching. This licentiate project focuses on the importance of aesthetic expressions in sloyd teaching and examines 1) how aesthetic expressions communicate in co-creation with the work in sloyd, and 2) what is needed for aesthetic expressions to be used as a resource in sloyd teaching. In the licentiate project, aesthetic expression is seen as an actor in the work in sloyd and this is made visible through concepts from posthumanist theories in Embodied Learning, New Materialism and Posthumanist Pedagogy. Theoretical starting points are also taken from craft science, as well as from philosophical theories of craftsmanship that touch on the field of Posthumanism.

The first study of the licentiate thesis draws empirical data from a filmed digital guided tour of a sloyd exhibition and is presented in Jagell (2022). A clip where a guide presents a turned bowl is used and analysed with multimodal interaction analysis. The analysis reveals five clues as to how aesthetic expressions can communicate and be communicated. Clues that have a potential to guide the design of teaching where aesthetic expression is used as a resource. 

The project's second study is a study with film material from teaching in a sloyd workshop repeated with three groups of 8–9-year-old students. The design of the research lesson is based on the results of the first study and frame grabs transformed to line drawings are used in multimodal interaction analysis. The results show that students use collaborative imagination, imaginary spaces and shared experiences in idea development. The study is presented in Jagell and Homlong (2024). 

In the licentiate essay (kappa) visual methods are used to make visible the synthesis between the project's studies and what that synthesis contributes to. This is done through pairwise image dialogues where selected images from the studies meet, as well as through an animation. Through this re-analysis of images from the licentiate project's two studies, examples of how the work in sloyd communicate with aesthetic expressions in co-creation are made clear. The animation also visualises the agency of materials from the students' perspective and shows how movement and touch can be linked to choices related to aesthetic expression. 

The conclusion of the licentiate project is that aesthetic expression can be seen as an actor in the work in sloyd. Based on the theoretical foundation, proposals are made for professional language for the development of sloyd teaching where aesthetic expression is used as a resource. These suggestions, called didactic keys, have the potential to be used in further research, in discussions within sloyd teacher training programmes, and in collegial discussions between sloyd teachers in sloyd teacher teams.