Transcript Slide 1

ES 3219: Early Years Education, Week 10:
Malguzzi The Reggio Emilia Approach
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.
Loris Malaguzzi 1920-1994
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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
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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.
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.
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
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)
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 costbenefit 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/labourcapacity.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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)
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.
Malaguzzi The Reggio Approach: Pedagogical Documentation
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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 reread 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.
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).
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
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.
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)
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)
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)
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).
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)
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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
ES 3219: Early Years Education, Week 10:
Malguzzi The Reggio Emilia Approach
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