Reggio Emilia Preschools

Reggio Emilia is a system of education—a pedagogy—focused on preschool students. It embraces and encourages the unique curiosities of each child, grounding education in the needs and conditions of the surrounding community. Teachers, parents, community members, the classroom, and the local environment are all integral components to how a child learns to participate in the world in the Reggio method. But it goes one step further—recognizing how teachers and parents learn from their observations of and interactions with children.

The pedagogy gets its name from where it first arose: Reggio Emilia, a small city in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region. One of the wealthiest regions in Europe, almost a third of its economy flows through cooperative businesses, in industries such as agriculture, manufacturing, and finance. But it was not always this well-off. Immediately following World War II, Emilia-Romagna was one of the poorest, most devastated regions in the country.

Educator Loris Malaguzzi developed the system in response to the war’s devastation, as a way to inoculate children against fascism and similar nationalistic, depersonalizing ideologies. The original Reggio Emilia preschools were funded by local women, and as a result the community was highly involved in how the schools operated.

Teachers, parents, community members, the classroom, and the local environment are all integral components to how a child learns.

Today, there are many Reggio-inspired schools around the world, making this style of preschool a regional export. Naturally, their interpretations of the core ideas vary, since Reggio Emilia schools should be flexible and adaptive to the needs of the locality, its families, and the individual students.

According to Malaguzzi, Reggio-inspired schools should be organized to foster strong relationships among “three central protagonists”: children, teachers, and parents. These relationships allow them to influence and learn from each other, continuously. “Our aim is to make a school that is a place of research, learning, revisiting, reconsideration, and reflection,” he wrote in 1993. “We strive to create an amiable school where children, teachers, and families feel a sense of well-being.”

Reggio schools train students to participate in democratic and cooperative structures throughout their lives by turning the classroom into a radically democratic place. “Ensuring that every child feels a sense of security and belonging within the school enables each child to accept and participate actively in transforming situations that are part of learning experiences,” wrote Malaguzzi. “The group becomes self-sustaining, developing its own conversation, its own ways of communicating, acting, and thinking.”

The role of the teacher is different from more conventional schools as well. In Reggio-style schools, teachers behave as facilitators for learning, and a significant part of their role is focused on documenting the behavior of children and tailoring teaching styles accordingly. By documenting and thinking deeply about the progress of students, and then discussing broader observations among themselves, teachers practice an iterative process rather than an inflexible and repetitive one.

A popular book about Reggio Emilia preschools, The Hundred Languages of Children, explains that teachers “need to redefine their roles so that they are more than conveyors of knowledge and supporters of children. They are creators and sustainers of relationships; they are researchers; they must learn to follow children’s time and interests; they must sometimes think ahead, be the chief protagonist, invent, prompt, design, create, be the audience and the listener, the arbiter and judge, the author and scribe, the listener and recorder.”

Reggio Emilia preschools turn the classroom itself into an environment where children internalize the values of collaboration and democratic society even before having the vocabulary. These experiences prime children to be active participants in the world around them.