How Finland Teaches Multiliteracy

Finnish primary schools treat 'text' broadly: a picture book, a bus timetable, a podcast and a bar chart are all things a child learns to read, question and create. This is multiliteracy, one of seven transversal competences in the national curriculum.

What counts as 'text' in a Finnish classroom

In everyday English, 'literacy' usually means reading and writing words on a page. Finland's curriculum uses a wider lens. A child is asked to interpret and produce many kinds of 'texts': a diagram in a science book, a map, a piece of music, a photograph, a chart of the week's weather, a short video. Multiliteracy is the umbrella skill of making sense of, and creating with, all of these forms.

Why it sits across every subject, not its own lesson

There is no weekly 'multiliteracy' lesson on the timetable. Instead, it is built into how subjects are taught: a maths class that reads a bar chart before drawing one, a history class that compares two illustrations of the same event, a Finnish-language class that looks at how a headline differs from a caption. Academic reviews of how schools apply this note that interpretation varies locally, since the national curriculum sets the goal rather than a fixed method for reaching it.

What this looks like for a K-5 child

In the early primary years this often starts small and concrete: sorting picture cues before letters, comparing two versions of the same story told in pictures and in words, or using a simple pictograph before a numeric graph. The aim is not screen time, and multiliteracy is not the same as digital literacy; a paper map or a picture book counts just as much as a website.

• Comparing a photograph and a written description of the same scene
• Reading a simple bar chart or pictogram in maths
• Noticing the difference between a fact and an opinion in a short text
• Retelling a story using pictures, then using words

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