Heads up: This post is 14 years old. My thinking may have evolved since then — read it with that in mind.
Hailed as the best pre-schools in the world by Newsweek magazine in 1991, the Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education has attracted the worldwide attention of educators, researchers and just about anyone interested in early childhood education best practices.
Loris Malaguzzi (1920-1994) founded the ‘Reggio Emilia’ approach at a city in northern Italy called Reggio Emilia. The ‘Reggio’ approach was developed for municipal child-care and education programs serving children below six. The approach requires children to be seen as competent, resourceful, curious, imaginative, inventive and possess a desire to interact and communicate with others.
The Reggio Emilia philosophy is based upon the following set of principles:
Children must have some control over the direction of their learning;
Children must be able to learn through experiences of touching, moving, listening, seeing, and hearing;
Children have a relationship with other children and with material items in the world that children must be allowed to explore and
Children must have endless ways and opportunities to express themselves.
But enough official mumble jumble, what does Reggio Emilia mean to me?
To me, first and foremost, Reggio Emilia is a culture that values children, and that culture is created by parents. The parents of Reggio Emilia (the city) built the first school themselves after the war! It’s a community effort! At the time, a lot of the families had both parents working, but because they truly value their children, they created this system to raise their children together, literally “takes a whole village to raise a child”! Nowadays, most parents are too busy with work and with their own lives, they simply send their kids to school and expect the school make them learn. I think that’s the wrong way to do it. I actually imagine a new way of work / life adjustment for the whole society, scaling back work to 4 days a week, then 5 ~ 6 families together can take turns taking care of each others’ kids!
Secondly, REA means we as teachers don’t directly “teach” the kids. Loris Malaguzzi wrote “The Hundred Languages of Childhood” (http://www.reggiokids.com/about/hundred_languages.php)), a beautiful poem that reminds me everyday not to take 99 away from my kids, because as adults, we’re used to giving that “one definite answer”. In REA, we don’t teach kids “there’s only one correct answer”! Instead, we simply provide “seeds of ideas” for the children to construct their own knowledge with! We setup the environment, put them in conditions for discovery and learning, give them a hand or “scaffold” them when they are stuck and are about to get frustrated. Finally, we document! Documentation is one of the key things teachers do in REA.
So… “The Reggio Emilia approach to education is committed to the creation of conditions for learning that will enhance and facilitate children’s construction of ‘his or her own powers of thinking through the synthesis of all the expressive, communicative and cognitive language’” - Edwards and Forman, 1993.
Finally, REA is about culture and nature to me. It’s important to pass on your own cultural identity, your family’s culture, but also to be cross cultural, allowing the kids to grow up in a “world’s environment”, because we are all shackled by our language, a broader cultural upbringing means a broader mind. REA also emphasize outdoor play, which is something that is sorely missed in Hong Kong. I think it’s obvious that human’s removal from nature in the industrialized age is creating what may become the biggest disaster in human history! Our ways of life simply isn’t sustainable and we’re beginning to see the nature’s food chains collapsing in the eco-system. Our children are going face this unprecedented crisis, and I believe we need to put them back in nature’s environment and let their intuition teach them how to rise up to it when they grow up.
I first learned of the Reggio Emilia Approach from Sir Ken Robinson’s RSA talk on education reform, I highly encourage you to watch it as well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U