If you have not heard about Reggio Emilia and their philosophical approach to teaching and learning, you need to be aware. Having spent the last weekend participating in a conference titled "Journey of Possibilities: Reggio Inspirations in Elementary Contexts", there was an anxiousness created within me that is pushing me to share. Through the conference I was inspired by Paola Cagliari, Director of Preschools and Infant toddler centres from Reggio Emilia; Lella Gandini, U.S. Liaison for Reggio Children; Harold Gothson, Senior Consultant for Reggio Emilia Institute from Stockholm, Sweden; and Mara Krechevsky from Project Zero at Harvard University. It is through these individuals that I have gained a better understanding of education and the approaches we should be using. There is a fundamental switch that is embodied by the Reggio Emilia approach to educating young people. It started as an approach that was to be used within an early learning context but as Mara Krechevsky has found, it possess universal qualities for all levels of learning, pre-school age to adult.
The history of the development of the Reggio Emilia approach to learning is a grass roots event. My understanding is that post Second World War the town of Reggio Emilia, Italy was at a rebuilding point. Given a meagre amount of resources and upon the sale of left over relics from the war, the community was faced with a decision in what to do with the money. The community as a whole felt that it was most important for the future success of the community to use the funds to develop a pre-school. This was not just any pre-school; its focus was the development of democratic citizens for Italy. A ground up movement, the philosophy of education was unlike anything that was taking place in Italy at the time.
Today people from around the world are grappling with the implications of the Reggio Emilia approach to education. This approach provides the learner with the chance to develop their authentic self as opposed to the voice of a system as Robert Starratt (2010) refers to in his book Refocusing School Leadership. Fraser and Gestwick (2002) highlight the principles at the heart of the approach to learning including: the image of the child (competent, strong, inventive, and full of ideas); environment as teacher (designing an environment that facilitates learning); relationships (with the environment, the people in that environment, and its involvement in the co-construction of knowledge); collaboration (amoung teachers, children and teachers, children and parents, children and children and the larger community); documentation (a verbal and visual trace of the experiences and work and opportunities to revisit, reflect and interpret); progettazione (making flexible plans for the further investigation of ideas and devising a way to carry them out); provocation (listening closely to children and devising a means for provoking further action and thought); one hundred languages of children (making symbolic representations of ideas and doing so through a number of different media; and transparency ( using light as a symbol of the openness to ideas and theories from other parts of the world) ( p. 11).
Learning as viewed through the lens of Reggio Emilia and its philosophy can be simplified to the basic formula of "adult + child + context = learning". Note that the adult in this formula could be any individual that is involved in that child's life. It is the role of the adult to provide space for a child's learning. There is also an acknowledgement of the role of context in the learning process. Schools of the future must play the role of citizen houses where students can form their own opinions and not those that the system perpetuates. Often we as adults can get in the way of learning and this is evident in the high level of dissatisfaction that can be seen particularly in the high school context. Learners are reduced to cattle that are to be herded through an education system that favours the development of an inauthentic learning experience which can be reduced to a superficial understanding that is brought on by the demands of a high accountability framework based on standardized assessment.
Reggio Emilia and its philosophy is not something that you define yourself as. Unlike the approach that is found in the Montessori School's, Reggio does not have a defined curriculum. Educators will find in Reggio an inspiration to change their approach to education. It provides you the opportunity to reflect on your beliefs of what good education looks like. For those of us who struggle with what the new postmodern approach to education should look like, Reggio Emilia provides insight. The approach involves students as researchers and our job as educators is to provide stimulation in questioning, in documenting the process and participation as a learner ourselves.
Are we breeding through didactic instruction a group of learners that will lead to a passive society? I think so, but I whole heartedly feel that the inspiration that Reggio Emilia provides will be the future's response.
References
Starratt, R. J. (2010). Refocusing school leadership. New York: Routledge.
For those that are interested I have included websites that Mara Krechevsky included during her keynote address. They are related to project zero, a Reggio inspired project for the North American context.
Project Zero; http://www.pz.harvard.edu/
Making Learning Visible: http://www.pzweb.harvard.edu/mlv/ Resources: http://www.makinglearningvisibleresources.org/
School Reform Initiative: http://schoolreforminitiative.org/ specifically look at the protocols that are listed
