Collaboration on Nick Wang

What is the Reggio Emilia Approach?

Thu, 17 May 2012 04:16:00 +0000

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

Why I think the education system is harmful for our children

Fri, 11 May 2012 10:03:00 +0000

I cannot say it any better than Sir Ken Robinson, if you haven’t watched his TED talks, please watch them here:

The current system of education was conceived during the intellectual culture of the enlightenment, and in economic circumstances, the Industrial Revolution. It’s modeled on the interests of Industrialization, based on a social structure of “a few elites at the top of the pyramid and a majority of low class laborers at the bottom”. Hence schools are all about conformity and standardization, getting children ready to be a slave in the system.

This used to work, in my father’s generation, it used to be that if you did well in school, you would have a job, and if you went to college, you would become management! This model is now broken. Now, civil engineers are waiting tables, masters of psychology are also waiting tables! People who have jobs are disgruntled about their dead end jobs, and young people are completely disenfranchised! As a parent, we need to open our eyes and see that schools are doing our children a disservice by herding them into this linear, overloaded system.

Here’s one frightening example on “Divergent Thinking”.

“Divergent Thinking” is an essential capacity for creativity. It’s the ability to see lots of possible answers to a question, lots of ways to interpret a question, to think laterally and not just in linear or convergent ways.

In the book “Break Point & Beyond”, scientists did a longitudinal studies of divergent thinking. A test was given to 1500 kindergartners 3 - 5 years, 98% scored above “genius” level. They retested the same children 5 years later, at the age of 8 - 10, now it’s down to 32% at or above genius level. And again, 5 years later at the age of 13 - 15, only 10% scored above genius level. Finally they did a control test to 200,000 adults, 25 years or older, only 2% scored at genius level.

We all had this capacity to think divergently, but the education system systematically educates children out of their capacity of creativity and imagination. What I hope to accomplish is to build tools that will allow us parents to more easily take charge of our children’s education, so that we can ensure their young minds can remain inquisitive and they themselves filled with confidence to explore and solve the world’s problems!

Who am I?

Fri, 11 May 2012 09:45:00 +0000

My name is Nicholas Wang. I was born in Hong Kong and went through its dreadful education system until I was 15, when I moved to Washington State in the US of A. I attended high school in a small town called Issaquah, and then went on to study at the University of Washington. For 8 years, I worked at 2 of the largest internet companies in the world, MSN.com and Yahoo.com, until 2007 when I successfully outsourced my own position to India and I was laid off. This marked the end of my corporate life, working as a “gear” in the grinding machine.

While living and working in New York, I grew more and more discontent with the inequality placed upon us “commoners” by the super rich, top 1% of our society. I wanted to challenge the incumbents and help shift the power back into the hands of the people. When I was laid off in 2007, I decided I will no longer work for corporate America and began to create a web community that will allow people to collaboratively share information about evil businesses. By chance, I met the founder of CUUSOO, Mr. Kohei Nishiyama. He started CUUSOO.com back in 1997 to let people collaborate and submit their own product designs, and if enough people want to buy that product, then factories can make it for the people! It was a revolutionary idea! And I thought if I could help bring this system out of Japan, it has the potential to change the world! Flipping the “mass-manufactured in China” business model around and giving the power back to the independent designers and makers! I moved to Japan to led the creation of the awesome “LEGO models by everyone” site, so now if 10,000 people like your model, LEGO will make it into a real, official product!

While working at CUUSOO in Japan, I created an open source project called “Open Hippel”. My idea was that if we could provide the CUUSOO system free of charge for anyone to use, then people can use it for their own communities. Users can submit issues and ideas, the top ones will get voted up so that resources can be distributed more intelligently. Then, if one of those ideas is a product, it can be sourced back to CUUSOO to be manufactured. I contacted one of my friends in Hong Kong who is a products engineer, we started Makible.com with the idea that it’ll receive product designs sourced from CUUSOO. In 2011, Makible was launched as a startup business and I moved (back) to Hong Kong to join full time as co-founder.

Here’s a talk a gave at Pecha Kucha Tokyo about “Changing the World with User Innovations”:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTqlA3I86lQ?wmode=transparent]

We also used our own system to crowdfund the “MakiBox” 3D printer project (which gathered USD $150,000+ in funds!). Our idea with the 3D printer is that currently, all the 3D printers out there are hobbyists projects that are too expensive and too intimidating for the average consumer. There hasn’t been any groundbreaking objected made with a 3D printer because only hardcore engineers are using it. What we need is to make a 3D printer for the masses. Something that is cheap like a Nintendo or Playstation, and well designed so it doesn’t look like a scary pile of metal bars bolted together! By doing these, I believe we can get our 3D printer into the hands of the gamers, the kids, the dads, the average Joe who has lots of ideas! I believe we can jump start innovations once I put this tool in their hands!

I’ve also been helping my friends at Peer-2-Peer University early on, participating and leading courses, improving its overal community’s user experience.

As you can see, I’m passionate about the “collaborative economy”, enabling users to innovate and solve problems together. I’m now starting this weekend playgroup that emphasize on “child initiated, parents framed” learning, because I think this is one of the most important thing (if not THE most important thing) we can do to change the future! You can read more about my ways of learning in the Reggio Emilia Approach page.

A Child Initiated, Parents Organized Playgroup in Hong Kong

Wed, 09 May 2012 09:05:00 +0000

The world’s population surpassed 7 billion last year, with 50% of that living in cities. Across the world, people are losing their jobs and college graduates can’t even find jobs. The system we live in is breaking at its seams, it can no longer employ and sustain the rapid expansion of human population.

So, are you satisfied with just sending your children to school to get “educated”, and hope that they’ll do OK when they grow up?

How do we educate our children to take their place in the economies and ecologies of the 21st century, when millions of people have already been marginalized by the system right now?!

I share these same concerns with you because I’m a new dad of a 21 months old boy and a 2 months old girl. Even though I’m not an educator by profession, I’ve been learning a lot about Early Childhood Education methodologies like Montessori and the Reggio Emilia Approach, and using it in my own home! So much so that my wife and I have earned a Reggio Emilia educator certificate. (My wife and I are the only 2 in Hong Kong as far as we know!)

As a concerned parent who have been working at the forefront of online collaboration, creating systems that enable user innovations like the official LEGO crowdsource model creation site, and my own internet startup Makible that sells the most user friendly 3D printer in the world, (You can find out more about me and my experience in “User Collaborative Innovations” here.) I’m now starting a parents organized playgroup on the weekends. Besides wanting to provide the best for my own children, my goal is to create a simple system for parents around the world to collaborate and form their own parents led playgroups for children from 1 to 6.

This is an effort that requires parents to be highly involved, if you share the same values as I do, and have a child of similar age as my son (~2 yrs old, “trouble 2” beginning to emerge), then let’s do this together! We can meet at my apartment in Prince Edward, where I’ll provide an environment with “seeds” for exploration. Throughout the sessions, I’ll be taking pictures and documenting the children’s every discovery, trouble and growth. Parents will receive their kids’ documentations after each session.

If you’re interested in it please tell me a little bit about yourself on this form.

Looking forward to meeting other amazing parents and kids in Hong Kong!