When planning their instruction, Nordic teachers rely on national and subject specific curricula. Nevertheless, Nordic countries share several educational key characteristics, national curricula included (Klette, 2018, Mølstad & Karseth, 2016). As for language arts, different purposes of literature education are given weight in different countries. However, there are also a number of common features. For instance, positive reading experiences and the assumption that reading literature can contribute to personal growth are emphasized in Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish curricula (Gourvennec et al., 2020). Cross-country comparisons are valuable since such studies make it possible to discern patterns and characteristics that are hard to reveal in a more homogenous context. Consequently, such studies can help us discover and question practices that otherwise might be taken for granted. Educational settings are generally very complex, which means that systematic investigations are necessary if we want to understand what goes in the classroom. Video observations have been proven suitable for such studies (Blikstad-Balas, 2017). This presentation relies on two comparative cross-country studies investigating Nordic literature instruction and aims at highlighting a number methodological challenges that we faced when these studies were performed. Both studies were based on video-recorded language arts lessons from a large scale video study (LISA Nordic). The first study quantitatively describes how, and to what extent, literature is used in 102 Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish LA classrooms, whereas the second study concentrate on cognitive activation (in relation to literature instruction) in 84 Norwegian and Swedish classrooms. Based on experiences from these two studies, a number of methodological challenges arise. First, since all teachers who took part in the LISA-study were asked to follow their normal planning they introduce and use literature in various ways. Some practices (e.g. a strong focus on the cultural heritage, or an emphasis on genre issues) were more common in some contexts than in others, which suggests that literature instruction might mean different things in the different countries. Second, in order to be able to draw reliable conclusions, it is of vital importance to gain sufficient information about the different contexts, which is a challenge. A key question is therefore: How much context information is required when aiming at comparting instructional practices across contexts?

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