Finnish Teachers Making Sense of and Promoting Multiliteracies in Early Years Education

In this chapter we explore how Finnish early years teachers use and make sense of the materials developed by the Monilukutaitoa Opitaan Ilolla (MOI) program for promoting young children's multiliteracies. In specific, the chapter focuses on the teachers' use of Whisper of the Spirit that consists of open-source, open-ended, and non-prescriptive activity cards. All of the four teachers were chosen for this study because of their interest in development of multiliteracies pedagogy. In the chapter, the authors ask how these teachers promote children's multiliteracy learning through versatile play, digital production, and multimodal practices through the MOI material, and how the use of the MOI material is adapted by teachers in local contexts. In this respect, they look into the teachers' agency in designing and conducting multiliteracy pedagogy, which they consider to be connected to autonomy, one of the four key elements of the Finnish teaching profession, and through that, in the transformative agency that emerged in the teachers' narrations. The chapter is structured around four teachers' semi-structured interviews and shows how the teachers made sense of the MOI material in their efforts to promote young children's multiliteracies, and how they applied the materials in their teaching in local contexts. Opportunities and challenges are identified and discussed.