When Reading Becomes Something You Can Smell: Children’s Engagement, Difference, and Multisensory Reading

 Reading is often imagined as a quiet, visual activity: eyes moving across a page, hands holding a book, minds making meaning through words and pictures. But anyone who has spent time with young children knows that reading rarely stays within the page. Children shift, lean closer, touch, laugh, turn away, return. They comment on colours, imitate sounds, trace shapes with their fingers, and sometimes smell what they are reading, even when there is nothing obvious to smell.

This observation sits at the heart of one of my articles, The role of gender in multisensory reading: Children’s engagement with olfaction-enhanced digital books, which was published last year. Conducted in collaboration with Janine Anne Campbell, Ingrid Midteide Løkken, and Natalia Ingebretsen Kucirkova, this project began with a simple but underexplored question: what happens to children’s reading when smell becomes part of the text itself?

Bringing scent into the reading situation

The study involved Norwegian kindergarten children aged four to five who read two versions of the same digital picturebook. One version was “standard”, relying on visuals, narration, and interactivity. The other was identical in every respect except one: at particular moments in the story, children could smell scents that were synchronised with the narrative.

The aim was not to test whether children could identify smells correctly. It was to understand how scent changes the experience of reading. What happens to attention, emotion, movement, and interaction when reading becomes something that reaches the nose as well as the eyes and ears?

We observed the children closely, recording facial expressions, bodily movements, verbal responses, and patterns of engagement. What emerged very quickly was that smell did not simply “add” something extra to the book. It reorganised the reading situation.

Children leaned forward more often. They paused longer. Some closed their eyes. Some smiled before speaking. Some wrinkled their noses, laughed, or pulled back, only to return and smell again. Reading slowed down, but in a way that felt fuller rather than interrupted.

In other words, reading became something lived through the body.

Engagement is not just attention

One of the main findings of the study was that children showed significantly higher engagement with the olfaction-enhanced book than with the standard version. But engagement here did not mean simply “paying attention” or “staying on task”. It appeared as a layered phenomenon: emotional reactions, sensory curiosity, bodily movement, talk, and interaction.

Some children responded to scent by narrating their own experiences. Others used smell to anticipate what might happen next. Some repeated actions, wanting to smell again. Smell did not operate as decoration. It acted as a catalyst for involvement.

Importantly, these engagements were not uniform. Children related to scent differently. Some were immediately expressive, others tentative. Some were drawn to the novelty, others to the feelings it evoked. This diversity of responses is central. It reminds us that sensory experiences do not produce one kind of reader. They open space for multiple ways of being with a text.

Gendered patterns, without fixed scripts

The study also explored gender, not as a binary trait but as something lived and performed in interaction. We did not begin with the assumption that “girls respond this way” and “boys respond that way”. Instead, we asked whether multisensory reading environments invite different forms of engagement, and how these might intersect with gendered expectations in early childhood.

What we found was not a simple division, but tendencies. Some children engaged more expressively, verbally, or relationally. Others engaged through movement, repetition, or sensory exploration. These patterns sometimes clustered in ways that echoed familiar gender norms in early childhood settings, but they were never stable or exclusive.

What was striking was that the olfactory book seemed to widen the field of possible engagements. It created openings where children could move beyond typical classroom performances of reading. Smelling disrupted the quiet, controlled script of “good reading behaviour”. It allowed children to react, negotiate, hesitate, repeat, and feel.

In this sense, multisensory reading did not reinforce difference so much as make it visible, negotiable, and legitimate. It offered more ways to participate.

Smell as a literacy resource

Smell is rarely discussed in relation to literacy. It is usually positioned as background atmosphere or as a trigger for memory, rather than as something that actively shapes meaning-making. Yet in this study, scent functioned as a literacy resource.

Children used smell to anchor emotion, to guide attention, and to organise interaction. Smell became part of how the text was read. It contributed to pacing, anticipation, and affect. It supported meaning not by explaining, but by orienting.

This matters for smell studies because it shifts the question from “what does smell represent?” to “what does smell do in situated practices?” In early childhood reading, smell did not act as an object of perception alone. It acted as a relational force, linking text, body, memory, and social space.

Toward Critical Sensory Multimodal Literacy

Working closely with the children’s engagements led me to develop what I now call Critical Sensory Multimodal Literacy. Rather than treating sensory elements as additions to multimodality, this perspective begins from the assumption that reading is always already sensory, embodied, and socially situated.

Critical Sensory Multimodal Literacy brings together three commitments. First, to multimodality, recognising that meaning is made through many modes beyond written language. Second, to sensory engagement, taking how smell, touch, sound, movement, and affect shape interpretation. Third, to critical literacy traditions, particularly those influenced by Freire, which foreground power, participation, and the conditions under which meaning is made.

From this view, multisensory reading is not only about enriching experience. It is about who is invited to participate, how difference is negotiated, and what forms of engagement are valued. When reading becomes something that can be smelled, touched, and felt, it becomes harder to restrict it to narrow performances of literacy. New forms of agency appear.

Why this matters beyond the classroom

For smell studies, this work offers a small but significant shift. It places smell within a domain rarely centred in olfactory research: early literacy. It shows that scent does not only operate in heritage, art, medicine, or marketing, but also in everyday learning practices. It shapes how children relate to texts, to each other, and to themselves as readers.

For educators, it suggests that sensory modalities can support more inclusive reading environments. Not because they are inherently motivating, but because they legitimise different ways of engaging. They allow children to approach texts through curiosity, emotion, memory, movement, and social interaction.

And for researchers, it raises methodological questions. How do we study reading when it is distributed across bodies, senses, and relations? How do we document moments that are fleeting, affective, and difficult to verbalise? Smell unsettles comfortable categories. It asks us to attend differently.

Reading with the whole body

Watching children read with scent is a reminder that literacy is not something that happens only in the head. It unfolds in posture, gesture, expression, hesitation, excitement, and connection. Smell does not replace words or images. It reorients them.

In the olfaction-enhanced reading sessions, the overall pattern suggested a different kind of engagement. Rather than simply “more attention,” children’s responses became more visibly affective and embodied, which aligned with the study’s findings of higher engagement in the scent condition. Put simply, adding smell did not just decorate the story. It shifted the reading experience in ways we could observe and measure.

If smell studies prompt us to reconsider how knowledge is perceived, then early childhood literacy presents a powerful platform for that invitation. Here, reading is still open. It is still being learned, negotiated, and embodied. Bringing smell into this space does not simply add another sense; it also enhances the experience. It re-asks what reading is, who it is for, and how it might be otherwise.

References

Gacumo, R. J. (2025). Critical sensory multimodal literacy: Children’s engagement, gender, and inclusion in multisensory reading in early childhood education [Manuscript submitted for review]. University of Stavanger.

Gacumo, R. J., Campbell, J. A., Løkken, I. M., & Kucirkova, N. I. (2025). The role of gender in multisensory reading: Children’s engagement with olfaction-enhanced digital books. International Journal of Educational Research, 133, 102658. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2025.102658  

Gacumo, R. J. (2026). Reading Gender in Early Childhood: Schemas, Scripts, and the Multimodal Shaping of Children’s Lived Performances. Education Sciences, 16(1), 25. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci16010025