REGGIO EMILIARoots of Resolve, a New Vision of Child, & an International Inspiration

Independent Research ProjectARE6049: History of Art Education, Spring 2015

Shaina Miller

POST WW2 ITALYIn fascist Italy, Mussolini used education as vehicle for propaganda and war. Young boys were considered future instruments of war and their education was focused on military training. There were many reasons life was hard in fascist Italy, but the corrupt education system was intolerable for many, especially in the Northern Italian region and city of Reggio Emilia.

In the days after the end of World War 2, the city people of Villa Cella used their physical and collective strength to transform rubble from bombed out buildings into a new future for their children.

Their act of inspiration and resolution was witnessed by a young school teacher who would become the key protagonist of an internationally inspiring project of art, community, and early childhood education.

The city of Reggio Emilia has since been awarded the highest military honor from the Italian government for their resistance of fascism and Nazi German occupation.

I am lucky to remember it very clearly. When word reached the city I remember my confused and incredulous reaction. The news was that the people of Villa Cella had started to build a school for children. That they were taking bricks from the bombed-out houses and were using them to build the walls of the school. Only a few days passed since the Allied liberation and everything was still totally upside down. I asked for confirmation - nobody knew anything for sure. There was no phone and Villa Cella seemed like miles away from anywhere. I felt very hesitant and shy. My logical skills, those of a young elementary school teacher stunned by events, led me to conclude that if it was true … it wasn’t just unlikely or strange, it was totally unbelievable. So I took my bike and set off for Villa Cella. A farmer I met on the outskirts of the village confirmed everything: he showed me the place, which was much further ahead. There were piles of sand and bricks, a wheelbarrow of hammers, shovels, and picks. Under a sunshade made of scraps of materials, two women were hammering bricks clean of old cement. The news was true and it rang out on that sunny spring day in the stubborn irregular hammering of the two women. One gave me a guarded look: I was a stranger from the city … ‘We’re not crazy you know, if you want to see the really good part come on Saturday and Sunday when everybody’s here.’ Going home, what I felt was more than happiness, it was sheer wonder. I was an elementary school teacher, I had five years of teaching experience and three years of university training: perhaps it was my very profession that was holding me back. My modest preconceptions were blown away: that the idea of building a school would even occur to ordinary people, women, laborers, workers, farmers, was already traumatic enough. The fact that these same people, with no money, no technical assistance, authorization or committees, no school inspectors or party leaders, were working side by side, brick by brick, to construct the building, was the second shock. But trauma or paradox, the event was simply true and I loved it, it excited me, it turned logic and prejudice, the old rules of pedagogy and of culture, upside down. It set everything back to square one, and opened up completely new horizons. I understood that the impossible was a word that had to be redefined … I perceived that this was a formidable and cultural lesson from which other extraordinary things would spring. We just needed to join forces and work together. This is just the story of the beginning of the Villa Cella people’s infant-toddler centre, but this is an on-going story of men and women, their ideals intact, who realized before I did that history can be changed, and that it is changed by making it your own - starting with the future of children.

-LO

RIS

MAL

AGU

ZZI

history can be changed, and… is changed by making it your own - starting with the future of children.

““

BY THE PERSONE FOR THE PERSONEThe RESILIENT and DETERMINED community of Reggio Emilia petitioned and fought Italian government for the

In 1963, the first city-run school was born and Malaguzzi considered it a needed social change that empowered the people. The new right to secular education for the city’s youngest residents (in a historically catholic educational backdrop), was founded in “civic determination” and passion. The community defined their desire and launched their school in an effort to have a new kind of education for young children; an education of “…better quality, free from charitable tendencies, not merely custodial, and not discriminatory in any way” (Malaguzzi, 1998, p.52). The people of Italy, with Reggio Emilia at the forefront, collectively fought the government and the Catholic church for eight years (1960-1968) to secure the right of young children (aged three years old to eight) to public education. Their successes included a steady increase of young children attending municipal schools and the important shift from a reliance on the Catholic church for early childcare to a number of municipal schools with great depth of responsibility and respect for learning.

1960s Parent Run Schools Reggio Municipal Education Project

RIGHTS OF CHILDREN to early childhood education

NEW

VIS

ION = Child as Capable

Learner & Cit izen, E d u c a t o r a s C o -Learner & Researcher, Expressive Arts as Valid Languages, Art Studio as Center for Investigation, Inherent O r g a n i z a t i o n a l E v o l u t i o n & S e l f -Renewal

Found in the resolution of history’s worst war, the concepts that stirred and strengthened Reggio Emilia’s protagonists were based in a great depth of respect for humanity, child, and art. In the inception of the project, Malaguzzi also defines a key epiphany of their “collective wisdom” as understanding that “…things about children and for children are only learned from children” (Malaguzzi, 1998, p.51). These early developments parallel similar thoughts in Germany, specifically, the child-study movement and were informed by a philosophy grounded in humanism. In a discussion about Loris Malaguzzi, Howard Gardner (1998), provides this honor, “Malaguzzi (as he is universal called) 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.xv). Three Reggio protagonists, Carolyn Edwards, Lella Gandini, and George Forman, trace the Reggio movement’s confluent conceptual sources: “The Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education is founded on a distinctive, coherent, evolving set of assumptions and perspectives drawn from three important intellectual traditions: European and American strands of progressive education, Piagetian and Vygotskian constructivist psychologies, and Italian postwar left-reform politics” (Edwards, Gandini, & Forman, 1998). At a 2004 anniversary of Loris Malaguzzi, another Reggio protagonist, Carlina Rinaldi, reflected that at the heart of Reggio philosophy is a simple commitment to a better quality of life for childhood.

Honoring of Malaguzzi, Carlina Rinaldi reflected on multiple patterns in Reggio pedagogy. First, the holding of child and childhood as an honored citizen and moment that contain precious vitality, optimism, answers, and the promise of humanity. Inherent in this theme is the ultimate vision of “competent child” and relationships of educator and environment that reflects this. Second, organization that encourages self-renewal, reinvention, and change in adventurous and radical creativity. Elements of this principles include determined research, innovation, as well as a welcoming of disruption, surprise, and reorientation. Third, Rinaldi attributes Malaguzzi with the authorship of the descriptive term of Reggio as, “the pedagogy of relations” (Rinaldi, 2004). Reggio relations are intended to be vibrant, open spaces for exchange, and include relationships among child and adult, educator and parent, school and community, atelieristas [artists] and pedagogistas [curriculum specialists], between peers, colleagues, local systems, cultures, and now amongst an international collaborative community (Rinaldi, 2004). Atelieristas [artists] and ateliers [art making environments] have been the elements designed for the intended mastery of, and focus on, the expressive arts as languages to support these exchanges. Lella Gandini (2005) reiterates the importance of these critical elements of art making as designed disturbance of out dated models of schooling. The importance of art and the atelier in Reggio thought and history are evident in their place and intentional integration in the first Reggio municipal school of 1963. While Gandini and Malaguzzi agree that the nature and development of art, atelier, and atelieristas in Reggio schools have evolved since inception, “The one stable element was an equal respect for the plurality and connections within children’s expressive languages" (Gandini, 2005, p.8).

self-renewal, reinvention,

and change

“TO A BETTER QUALITY OF LIFE FOR CHILDREN AROUND THE WORLD” -Carlina Rinaldi in memorial speech about Loris Malaguzzi

Loris Malaguzzi and the Reggio collective’s passion for the rights of children and new vision for education was deeply rooted in the children of their local community, but also extended “to a better quality of life for children around the world” (Rinaldi, 2004, p.169). This objective was set forth in a movement of chance as well as intention, and fueled by a political, artistic, and educational agenda. In 1981, the Reggio schools gathered their products of artistic inquiry and documentation to create an exhibit in their local community. Swedish educators witnessed the exhibit and requested that it be shown in Sweden and it subsequently opened at the Modern Museet in Stockholm. This exhibit, called the “Hundred Languages of Children,” evolved, traveled the world, and inspired massive international attention. In the 1990s, North American educators, educational theorists, and popular media settled their attention on the Reggio Emilia municipal schools. This consideration launched the opening of North American Reggio schools as well as professional development initiatives of educators to travel for summer intensives in efforts to revitalize intact educational institutions. In 2002, the North American Reggio Emilia Alliance launched to consolidate and inspire Reggio efforts in the region. In 2006, The Reggio Children International Network initiated efforts to be the collective link for Reggio educators and organizations in 36 countries including the United States, New Zealand, South Africa, Singapore, Sweden, Hong Kong, Canada, India, and of course, Italy (“About NAREA,” 2014).

1981 HUNDRED LANGUAGES EXHIBIT

2006 REGGIO CHILDREN INTERNATIONAL NETWORK

OF 36 COUNTRIES

Educators from different geographical and cultural perspectives have reflected that as champions of Reggio projects in new territories, they take on an important, and often overlooked, role of comprehensively considering their communities and cultural perspectives, before anything else. In Reflections: Reggio Emilia Principles within Australian Contexts, Australian educator Jan Millikan expressed the contemplative space the Reggio Emilia project has guided her through. “The [Reggio Municipal] schools do not provide a model, but rather the opportunity to reflect on our own educational theories, practices, and methods of organisation” (Millikan, 2003, p.5). Millikan offered that she and other Australian and New Zealander Reggio champions had to give deep thought and conversation to the unique community landscapes of their countries. They also had to unravel the webs of their cultural lenses, preexisting national assumptions about education and vision of child. In using a highly local (foreign) educational project as source, engaging in an international conversation and consideration of it’s power and universal qualities, and then processing the approach to once again apply to a local community, educators are engaging in a dynamic and inspired approach to relevant educational pedagogy construction (or revision).

“We have tried to cross boundaries but also inhabit them. In the face of historic antonyms - such as work-play, reality-imagination - we propose emotion and knowledge, creativity and rationality, programmazione and progettazione, teaching and research, individual and group, rigid science and plastic science” (Rinaldi, 2004, p.173). In this special handling of boarders, the Reggio Emilia approach also inherently inhabits the realms deeply local and globally universal. From the ashes of a World War, the optimism, collective strength, and unwavering dedication to the child has launched the Reggio Emilia educational project on to a world stage. Through unique border crossings and habitation, Reggio’s inspired vision of art, research, self-renewal, and educational theory is changing the handling and respect for childhood on every continent.

“WE HAVE TRIED TO CROSS BOUNDARIES BUT ALSO INHABIT THEM”

-LORIS MALAGUZZI

Learning and teaching should not stand on opposite banks and just watch the river flow by; instead, they should embark together on a journey down the water. Through an active, reciprocal exchange, teaching can strengthen learning how to learn.

REFERENCES

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.

1920-1994

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About NAREA - North American Reggio Emilia Alliance. (2014, January 20). Retrieved February 26, 2015, from http://reggioalliance.org/narea/ Cadwell L., Hill L., Gandini L., & Schwall C. (Eds.) (2005). In the spirit of the studio. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Edwards C., Gandini L., & Forman G. (Eds.) (1998). The hundred languages of children. Greenwich: CT: Ablex Publishing Company. Gandini, L. (2005). From the beginning of the atelier to materials as languages. In L. Gandini, L. Hill, L. Cadwell & C. Schwall (Eds.), In the spirit of the studio (pp.6-15) New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Gardner, H. (1998). Foreward: complementary perspectives. In Edwards C., Gandini L., & Forman G. (Eds.), The hundred languages of children (pp.xv-xviii) Greenwich, CT: Ablex Publishing Company. Malaguzzi, L. (1996). Catalogue of the exhibit: The hundred languages of children municipality of reggio emilia. In Millikan, J. (2003). Reflections: Reggio emilia principles within australian contexts. Castle Hill, New South Whales: Persimmon Press. Malaguzzi, L. (1998). Catalogue of the exhibit: The hundred languages of children municipality of reggio emilia. In Millikan, J. (2003). Reflections: Reggio emilia principles within australian contexts. Castle Hill, New South Whales: Persimmon Press. Millikan, J. (2003). Reflections: Reggio emilia principles within australian contexts. Castle Hill, New South Whales: Persimmon Press. Rinaldi, C. (2004). Crossing boundaries. In In dialogue with reggio emilia. Obingdon: OX: Routledge. Rinaldi, C. (2006). In dialogue with reggio emilia. Obingdon: OX: Routledge.