Notes on Reggio Emilia

I’ve recently been reading on the Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education and I’ve been learning quite a lot.

I’m posting some notes that I’ve picked up. This segment is from Reflections on the Reggio Emilia Approach, a collection of papers edited by Lilian G. Katz and Bernard Cesarone, monograph series of the ERIC/ EECE (1994).

The Reggio Emilia approach is described by Howard Gardner in “Complementary Perspectives on Reggio Emilia” in “The Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Approach to Early Childhood Education (1993),” as
…a collection of schools for young children in which each child’s intellectual, emotional, social, and moral potentials are carefully cultivated and guided. The principal educational vehicle involves youngsters in long-term engrossing projects, which are carried out in a beautiful, healthy, love-filled setting.”

The municipal early childhood programs in the city Reggio Emilia (pop. 130,000) located at the Emilia Romagna region, originated in cooperative schools started by parents at the end of World War II. The city currently supports 22 preprimary schools for children 3-6 years of age, as well as 13 infant-toddles centers for children under 3. Children of all socio-economic and educational backgrounds attend the programs, including special needs children; 50% of the city’s 3-6 years olds and 37% of the city’s children under 3 are served in the municipal schools and centers (Edwards, et al: Promoting Collaborative Learning)

[Why only 50 and 37%, I wonder… and how do they implement programs for special children?] – I read further and saw a figure that 90% of the children are enrolled, there are also privately funded institutions that might have catered to the other percentage of children not enrolled in the municipal funded centers.

Staff Development in Reggio Emilia
By Carlina Rinaldi, Municipal Preprimary Schools of Reggio Emilia,
Reggio Emilia, Italy

By way of introduction:
o Research as a permanent learning strategy for both children and adults.
o Staff development is a vital and daily aspect of work – of personal and professional identities.
o The group is not characterized simply by the sum of individual people or as a game between minority and majority thinking. Instead. It is a new way of thinking, it is a co-construction together towards a common interpretation of educational goals.

On competence:
o The fundamental premise of staff development is that it will develop the competence of the teacher by fostering interaction with children, parents, and colleagues. Moreover, every child has the right to have a competent, well-informed teacher. This competence is acquired through practice and through reflection within the teacher group.
o Teachers should be well educated in the broadest sense of the word. The teacher ought to be a person belonging to our present-day culture who, at the same time, is able to criticize, to question, and to analyze this culture. The teacher out to be intellectually curious, one who rebels against a consumeristic approach to knowledge and is willing to build upon knowledge rather than to consume it. To consider the teacher as such is both a premise and an objective.
o The main job [of educator] is to facilitate the entrance of children into the culture and the symbols around them and to help them to create new cultures and symbolization while respecting their own personal strategies, their own ways, their own timetable. The children are competent in this regard. We must support their “journey” by building with them and for them a network of understandings that is founded on the continual intertwining of the fields of knowledge and the fields of experience.
o The problem is not so much to question ourselves about how to teach children, but to ask ourselves what and how children can learn from a certain situation.

Promoting Collaborative Learning in the Early Childhood Classroom: Teachers’ contrasting Conceptualizations in Two Communities
By: Carolyn Edwards, Lella Gandini, and John Nimmo

Noteworthy Features of the City-financed, City-managed Systems of Preprimary and Infant-toddles Education in Reggio Emilia and Pistoia, Italy:
1. The ways in which children, teachers and parents are connected in to operative communities focused on the surrounding cit and region;
2. the ways in which children are stimulated toward cognitive, social, and emotional development through collaborative play and group projects.

o Rather than focusing on the developing child as an autonomous learner, Reggio Emilia and Pistoia educators see education as a communal activity and sharing of culture through collaboration among children and also between children and teachers, who open topics to speculation and negotiation. The Amherst, Massachusetts educators, in contrast, see education first and foremost as a means for promoting the development of each individual.

I’d like to put the Conclusion of this article in whole because it’s so interesting especially in describing the different cultural contexts with which teachers work with children, and presents as well very challenging questions on collaborative and individual learning.

Beginning with shared assumptions about the nature of the child of the schooling as a “system of relations and communications embedded in the wider social system” (Rinaldi, 1990), the educators in Reggio Emilia have developed over the past thirty years a distinctive approach to early education. The concrete features of this approach include, as key components, small group collaborative learning; continuity over time of child-child and child-teacher relations; a focus on problem solving and long-term projects involving mastery of many symbolic media; fostering of the connections between home, school, and the wider community; and awareness and appreciation of cultural heritage (city, region, and nation). Accompanying these concrete organizational features is a shared discourse or language of education that allows the Reggio teachers to collaborate, that is, in their own terms, to exchange ideals, listen to one another, and engage in meaningful conflict over ideas. Their language of education is readily apparent in their statements in the collaboration interviews, as well as the subsequent group vide-reflection discussions. It is based on a theory of knowledge that defines thinking and learning as social and communicative events – co-constructive experiences for both children and adults.
The Amherst educators, members of a school community founded in the 1960s based on Deweyian principles of progressive education, likewise developed a shared language of education. Central to their goals are promoting the development of each unique individual, within a strong community stretching backward and forward in time and containing children, their families, and all the staff at the school – director, librarian, teachers, assistant teachers, and others. This community is conceived as democratic, diverse, and drawing strength from the ties of cross-age relationships. Their language of education, very different from that heard in Reggio Emilia, is based on a theory of knowledge that sees thinking and learning as a matter of each child gaining knowledge of self, others, and the wider world through social interaction, research, and discussion – processes that stimulate the development of mature autonomy and self realization. Placing the two perspectives in juxtaposition, it is easy to see how each language of education constrains or directs the thinking of its teachers, but = at the same time packages ideas economically to make the communication and dialogue possible for the community. The language of education preferred in Amherst focuses teachers’ attention on individuals and how they develop and change over time. The preferred discourse makes it difficult for them to regard groups as the always desirable context for intellectual work and supports the view that teachers should closely monitor social interactions between children and be available to work closely in short, one-on-one or one-on-two spurts, with children engaged in intellectual work, so that children have opportunities for both guided and independent learning. In contrast, the language of education preferred in Reggio Emilia focuses teachers’ attention on children always in relation to the group, and makes it difficult for them to speak systematically about the value of their program in terms of what the children gain from it, year by year, across specific domains.
At the same time, the educators in each community seem to be aware of more dimensions and more complexity that what their language of education structures for them. As aw shall discuss in future writings, both groups of teachers are highly aware of the unique personality f each chills and also highly knowledgeable about the group processes in their classroom. Indeed, it appeared that the interviews and discussions involved in our research, particularly the cross-cultural video-reflection, provoked the teachers to consider the limitations of both their own and the other community’s discourse and practices.


I wonder, however, if anybody has ever made studies on the effects of the Reggio Emilia approach to the community or to Italy, for that matter. If their early childhood development programs are so world renowned to be superior, and with the knowledge that investment in ECD is worth all other investments, have the Reggio Emilia schools produced better individuals and communities as compared to other places in the world? Are the Italians better, in a sense, than other people in the world with different ECD or early childhood education approaches?