ES 3219: Early Years Education, Week 10:

1. ES 3219: Early Years Education,Week 10: Malguzzi The Reggio Emilia Approach

2. Malaguzzi in perspective “Malaguzzi… is the guiding genius of Reggio – the thinker whose name deserves to be uttered in the same breath as his heroes Froebel, Montessori, Dewey, and Piaget.” (Gardner, 1998, p.xvi) • In contrast with theorists such as Pestalozzi and Dewey, Malaguzzi successfully managed to establish, maintain and grow a system of education that realised his philosophy in practice.

3. Loris Malaguzzi 1920-1994 • 1945: Malguzzi became involved in building schools with parents from the bricks and girders remaining in the desolation of post-war Reggio Emilia. • Worked in a middle school for seven years before leaving, condemning its “stupid and intolerable indifference towards children, its opportunistic and obsequious attention towards authority, and its self-serving cleverness, pushing prepackaged knowledge” (Malaguzzi, 1998, p.50)! • He then went to Rome to study psychology before returning to Reggio Emilia to start a mental health centre for children with difficulties. During this period he ran the centre in the mornings and worked the afternoon and evening at the small parent-run schools for poor and undernourished children which had been established in the rubble of war. • “Things about children and for children are only learned from children” (ibid., p.51) This dictum prepared Malaguzzi and his fellow workers during the 40’s and 50’s for the establishment of the first Reggio Emilia municipal school in 1963. • By 1967 all the parent-run schools in Reggio Emilia had been taken over by the municipality, after a long campaign, which took place as part of a wider political struggle for publicly supported schools for 3-6 year olds. • 1971 – published first works Experiences for a New School for Young Children, & Community-Based Management in the Preprimary School • 1976 Backlash from the Catholic Church which attacked the schools as corrupting children and threatening the religious school establishment • 1980’s-early 1990’s Reggio Emilia reputation started to spread, via conferences and exhibitions to Scandinavia, and the United States, and globally, including to the UK (where it may have influenced the thinking of the authors of the Foundation Stage Guidance). • 1994 Malguzzi died suddenly.

4. Malaguzzi Influences Malaguzzi’s thinking shows a wide range of influences, not all ‘educational’: • US and European progressive education (Dewey) – e.g. as seen in British primaries in the 1960’s-70’s; • Piagetian and Vygotskian constructivist psychology; • Italian postwar left-reformist politics.

5. Malaguzzi Reggio Emilia Institutions Infant-toddler Centres • 4 months-3 years; • First established 1971; • Based on the idea that the youngest children are social beings – “they possess from birth a readiness to make significant ties with other caretakers beside their parents” (ibid., p.62). “it is not so important whether the mother chooses the role of homemaker or working mother, but rather that she feels fulfilment and satisfaction with her choice and receives support from her family, the child care centre, and, at least minimally, the surrounding culture” (ibid., p.62). • Set up in opposition to proponents of John Bowlby, and to the Catholic Church; • Focus on careful transition from focussed attachment on parents and home to shared attachment to adults and the infant-toddler centre environment; • Allows children to ‘live together’ for 5-6 years through infant-toddler centre into preprimary school Preprimary schools • 3-6 years

6. Malaguzzi The Reggio Approach • Born of a vision of the future experienced after the war – “to give a human, dignified, civil meaning to existence, to be able to make choices with clarity of mind and purpose” (Malaguzzi, 1998, p.57) • Derived as much from emerging practice, from culture, politics and economics as from ‘theory’ or pedagogical models. • Reggio is an approach rather than a coherent theory. Indeed Reggio proceeds as if operating with more than one theory. “[T]heory is legitimate only if it deals with problems that emerge from the practice of education and can be solved by educators” (ibid., p.86)(rather, presumably, than by academics). • “[A] unifying theory of education that sums up all phenomena of educating does not (and never will) exist. However, we do indeed have a solid core in our approach in Reggio Emilia that comes directly from the theories and experiences of active education and finds realization in particular images of the child, teacher, school, family and community.” (ibid. pp 84-5)

7. Malaguzzi The Reggio Approach • Malaguzzi’s writing contains and explicit critique of instrumentalism and technicism (as theorised, for instance by Foucault & Weber) and of commodification (cf. Marx); • Specific rejection of the ‘factory-model’ which presupposes the application of technologies to produce pre-determined outcomes of particular types: this is able to use these predictions to quantify cost-benefit ratios and efficiency of delivery. • Preprimary school is not a preparation for elementary school – such a model ‘imprisons’ teachers and children. Nor is it about the production of potential workers/labour-capacity.

8. Malaguzzi The Reggio Approach Principles • Children have a great deal of choice over where to be within the setting: • They can work in small groups with or without an adult, inside or outside. • Malaguzzi’s model is of a city of courtyards and piazzas, with market stalls to which children may turn and return. • Children encouraged to explore and express themselves through all of their available ‘languages’ – cognitive, communicative, creative. • Partnership among parents, educators and children; • Classrooms organized to support a collaborative problem-solving approach to learning; • Joint exploration among children and adults.

9. Malaguzzi The Reggio Approach Planning and curriculum • There is no curriculum (or guidance) which, Malaguzzi argues, would “humiliate” the Reggio schools, and subject them to the power of publishers (profiteers, and the State & Church). • Instead, each year a new series of related projects are proposed. “These themes serve as the main structural supports, but then it is up to the children, the course of events, and the teachers to determine whether the building turns out to be a hut on stilts or an apartment house or whatever” (ibid., p.88) • Rather than planning, there is ‘reconnaissance’ : A ‘flight’ over the available resources, human, environmental, technical and cultural; • Preview seminars, workshops and meetings with experts; • Teaching and learning does not have to be entirely improvised because of anticipation of what is not yet known: two thirds uncertainty to one third certainty.

10. Malaguzzi The Reggio Approach Planning and curriculum: The Project • No whole class instruction – all small group work (2-4 children). • Small groups engage in project-learning: in-depth, sustained investigation inspired by Dewey, and similar to the best examples of Plowden-era practice in the UK. Project work: • Helps children make deeper and fuller sense of events and phenomena in their environment; • Allows them to make their own choices in collaboration with teachers and peers about the type of work to be undertaken; • Strengthens children’s confidence in their own developing intellectual powers and shapes their dispositions towards learning. • Projects rely on a level of pertinent expectations about the kinds of choices the children will make, their methods, and the adults’ methods of intervention. Some of these expectations arise in initial discussion. • Adults continually review what has been happening in the project, setting up new situations to facilitate further development, with minimal direct intervention.

11. Malaguzzi The Reggio Approach Planning and curriculum • From talk to representation, the observing adult scribes, and uses the record as a stimulus to the next discussion and action; • Children may revisit what they have dome individually or in groups; • Graphic representations clarify and refine ideas in the translation from one (verbal) language to another (graphic) • Pairs of children working together should have discrepant abilities, but not be too widely separated. This allows for the greatest possibility of relations being established on the basis of exchanging ideas.

12. Malaguzzi The Reggio Approach The One Hundred Languages of Children Because 4 year old cannot readily express their thoughts in writing, other ways are employed to record their their memories, hypotheses, predictions, observations, feelings & imaginings, through: • Graphic languages • Dictations • Dramatic play • Graphic languages can be ‘read’ and documented and serve as the basis for next steps in a project. Graphic representations are displayed as part of a process (rather than as products, or as decorative)

13. Malaguzzi The Reggio Approach An education based on relationships • Learner and teacher cannot just relate to one another – they have to relate about something. In UK schools Bruner showed that the content of the relationship was largely managerial issues, feedback, performance, routines, rules, etc. In Reggio, the content of the relationship is the work itself – techniques, materials, ideas. • Children know at a preconscious level that teachers take their work seriously • Children must have the same teachers for three years.

14. Malaguzzi The Reggio Approach An education based on relationships • Child-teacher interactions should not devalue the role of the adult: Malaguzzi favours a “ping-pong match” model of interaction. • Relationships as sites of dynamic conjunction rather than cosseting; • Development of identity which comes from recognition from teachers and peers; • “[T]he system of relationships has in and of itself a virtually autonomous capacity to educate” (ibid., p.69)

15. Malaguzzi The Reggio Approach: Pedagogical Documentation Pedagogical documentation is • photographs, recordings and transcriptions of discussion, work at different stages, and, more recently, video - “making pedagogical (or other) work visible and subject to interpretation, dialogue, confrontation (argumentation) and understanding” (Dahlberg & Moss, 2006, pp. 15-16); • an “antibody” to assessment and normalizing criteria. • a “mirror” of individual experience and the basis for finding images of others with whom to engage in dialogue.

16. Malaguzzi The Reggio Approach: Pedagogical Documentation Documentation: • Makes the processes of learning the basis of dialogue with parents; • Allows children to develop a greater depth and extensiveness of understanding of their own work; • Supports the memory, offering children the opportunity to re-read the process; • Supports self-evaluation and group evaluation of the theories and hypotheses of each child; • Allows parents to become intimately aware of and involved in their children’s work in school; • Allows teachers a way of researching children’s understandings and intentions, providing a basis for future planning and strategy; • Allows progress and learning to be approached in a way that does not require tests, standards or checklists; • Enables parental expectations to be changed and challenges assumptions about parenting roles; • Allows parents to see how much teachers actually do, how they work together to plan, research and record, and offers a model of a co-operative society.

17. Malaguzzi The ‘Amiable Environment’ • Architecture and layout are very important to Malaguzzi (as, for instance, ‘open-plan’ schools were for progressive pedagogues in 1960’s/70’s Britain, or, indeed, as the Victorian schoolroom’s plan was to maintaining discipline) • An attempt to integrate educational aims with potential for the organization of work in order to facilitate “maximum movement, interdependence, and interaction.” (Malaguzzi, 1998, p.63) • Combination of contiguous space and differentiated areas. • The atelier – school laboratory/studio: large space for “experimenting with separate or combined visual languages” (ibid. p.64) – plays a central place in the Reggio Emilia approach. In addition mini-ateliers for each classroom allow project work to be sustained. • The walls “speak and document” (ibid. p.64).

18. Malaguzzi Adults’ roles Note on categories of staff in the Reggio system • Pedagogisti – one per several schools: more highly trained in psychology, pedagogical documentation, etc: • Ateliristi – one per school, based in the atelier, often artists or those with a background in visual arts • Teachers – several per school

19. Malaguzzi The Role of the Pedagogista Pedagogisti: • have an integrated philosophical, administrative, yechnical, pedagogical, social and political role; • guarantee the coherence and consistency of educayion across the Reggio Emilia municipality. • apply social constructivist and interactionist pedagogy to developing teachers ideas and working with teachers to identify new themes and experiences; • support relationships between teachers and families.

20. Malaguzzi The Role of the Atelierista Atelieristi: • develop creative expression of children; • read and research children’s drawing, representation, documentation, etc; • guide children in their projects; • provide workshops for documentation; • analyse children’s processes of learning and interconnections between children’s ideas, activities and representations. The atelier: • a laboratory or place of research • “a spaced rich in materials, tools, and people with professional competencies” (ibid. p.74)

21. Malaguzzi The Role of the Teacher Malaguzzi’s favoured metaphor for the role of the teacher was ‘Ariadne’s Thread’ (Rinaldi, 2006, p.54) because, like the lifesaving thread in the minotaur myth, the Reggio teacher’s task is giving orientation, meaning and value to the experience of schools and children (a way out of the ‘labyrinth’). Teachers seen as those who hold the thread, who construct and constitute the interweavings and connections, the web of relationships, to transform them into significant experiences of interaction and communication. (Rinaldi, 2006, pp.54-5)

22. Malaguzzi The Role of the Teacher • All teaching is co-teaching; • Co-teaching is the basic unit of collegial management and partnership structures. • “Teach nothing to children Except what children can learn by themselves” (Malguzzi, 1998, p.73)(echoes of Pestalozzi and Froebel). • “Stand aside for a while and leave room for learning, observe carefully what children do, and then, if you have understood well, perhaps teaching will be different from before.” (ibid., p.82) • Malaguzzi lists among “undemocratic teaching strategies”, “directives, ritualized procedures, systems of evaluation […] and rigid cognitivistic curriculum packages” (ibid., p.83). • In a critique of Vygotsky’s ZPD, Malaguzzi warns that it potentially readmits “the old ghosts of teaching that […][the Reggio approach] tried to chase away” (ibid. p83); • His answer is the principle of circularity: “[W]e seek a situation in which the child is about to see what the adult already sees. The gap is small between what each one sees, the task of closing it appears feasible, and the child’s skills and disposition create an expectation and readiness to make the jump. In such a situation, the can and must loan to the child his judgement and knowledge. But it is a loan with a condition, namely that the child will repay.” (Emphases added) (ibid., p.84)

23. Malaguzzi The Role of the Teacher • It is possible to observe readiness if one disregards the clock and pays attention to what is not expected. • “The child…dies if he does not sense that the adult is close enough to see how much strength, how much energy, how much intelligence, invention, capacity and creativity he possesses. The child wants to be seen, observed and applauded.” (Malaguzzi, in Rinaldi, 2006, pp.55-6) • Whilst theory and practice are reciprocal, practice takes precedence over theory, as relying on theory prevents teachers from being protagonists in the educational process, from the responsibility of educating (the parallel is with the child as protagonist – both teacher and learner are researchers).

24. Malaguzzi Creativity Malguzzi emphasized that there is no opposition between intellectual capacities and creativity, but rather that “[t]he spirit of play can pervade also the formation and construction of thought” (Malaguzzi, 1998, p. 77) • Creativity should not be considered a separate mental faculty but a characteristic of our way of thinking, knowing and making choices. • Creativity seems to emerge from multiple experiences, coupled with a well supported development of personal resources, including a sense of freedom to venture beyond the known. • Creativity seems to express itself through cognitive, affective, and imaginative processes. These come together and support the skills for predicting and arriving at unexpected solutions. • The most favourable situation for creativity seems to be interpersonal exchange, with negotiations of conflicts and comparison of ideas and actions being the decisive elements. • Creativity seems to find its power when adults are less tied to prescriptive teaching methods, but instead become observers and interpreters of problematic situations. • Creativity seems to be favored or disfavoured according to the expectations of teachers, schools, families, and communities as well as society at large, according to the way children perceive those expectations. • Creativity becomes more visible when adults try to be more attentive to the cognitive processes of children than to the results they achieve in various fields of doing and understanding. • The more teachers are convinced that intellectual and expressive activities have both multiplying and unifying possibilities, the more creativity favors friendly exchanges with imagination and fantasy. • Creativity requires that the school of knowing finds connections with the school of expressing, opening the doors (this is our slogan) to the hundred languages of children. Malaguzzi, 1998, pp75-7

25. References Abbott, L & Nutbrown, C. (2001) Experiencing Reggio Emilia: implications for pre-school provision, Buckingham: Open University Press Dahlberg, G. (2000) ‘Eveything is beginning and everything is dangerous: some reflections on the Reggio Emilia experience’ in Penn, H. (Ed) Early Childhood Services , Buckingham: OUP Dahlberg, G. & Moss, P. (2006) ‘Our Reggio Emilia’ in Rinaldi, C. In Dialogue with Reggio Emilia: Listening, researching and learning, London: Routledge Edwards, C.Gandini, L. & Forman, G. (Eds.) (1998) The Hundred languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Approach – Advanced Reflections, London: Ablex Publishing Corporation Malaguzzi, L. (1998) ‘History, Ideas and Basic Philosophy: An Interview with Lella Gandini’, in Edwards, C.Gandini, L. & Forman, G. (Eds.), The Hundred languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Approach – Advanced Reflections, London: Ablex Publishing Corporation Rinaldi, C. (2006) In Dialogue with Reggio Emilia: Listening, researching and learning, London: Routledge Soler, J. & Miller, L. (2003) ‘The Struggle for Early Childhood Curricula: acomparison of the English Foundation Stage Curriculum, Te Whäriki and Reggio Emilia’, International Journal of Early Years Education, 11 ( 1), pp.57-67 ES 3219: Early Years Education,Week 10: Malguzzi The Reggio Emilia Approach