What is the Reggio Emilia approach?

The Reggio Emilia approach fosters children's intellectual development through a systematic focus on symbolic representation. Young children are encourage to explore their environment and express themselves through all of their available "expressive, communicative, and cognitive languages," whether they be words, movement, drawing, painting, building, sculpture, shadow play, collage, dramatic play, or music, to name a few.

Classroom are organised to support a highly collaborative problem-solving approach to learning.

Other important features are the use of small groups in project learning, teach-child continuity, and the community-based management method of governance.

In Reggio Emilia, education is seen as a communal activity and sharing of culture through joint exploration among children and adults who together open topics to speculation and discussion.

- "Hundred languages of children"




Glossary of Reggio Emilia Terms:

Atelier: workshop, or studio, furnished with a variety of resource materials, used by all the children and adults in a school

Atelierista: Teacher trained in art education, in charge of the atelier; supports teachers in curriculum development and documentation

100 Languages of Children

This is really inspiring.

The child

is made of one hundred.
The child has
a hundred languages
a hundred hands
a hundred thoughts
a hundred ways of thinking
of playing, of speaking.
A hundred always a hundred
ways of listening
of marvelling, of loving
a hundred joys
for singing and understanding
a hundred worlds
to discover
a hundred worlds
to invent
a hundred worlds
to dream.
The child has
a hundred languages
(and a hundred hundred hundred more)
but they steal ninety-nine.
The school and the culture
separate the head from the body.
They tell the child:
to think without hands
to do without head
to listen and not to speak
to understand without joy
to love and to marvel
only at Easter and at Christmas.
They tell the child:
to discover the world already there
and of the hundred
they steal ninety-nine.
They tell the child:
that work and play
reality and fantasy
science and imagination
sky and earth
reason and dream
are things
that do not belong together.

And thus they tell the child
that the hundred is not there.
The child says:
No way. The hundred is there.

Loris Malaguzzi

(translated by Lella Gandini)