What is the Reggio Emilia Philosophy?

In the words of educators from Reggio Emilia, Italy:

Reggio Emilia Philosophy Fundamental Principles

• Children are active protagonists of their growth and development processes
  Children possess extraordinary potentials for learning and change, as well as extensive affective relational, sensory, and intellectual resources that manifest in an ongoing exchange with the cultural and social context.

• The hundred languages
  The hundred languages are a metaphor for the extraordinary potentials of children, their knowledge-building and creative processes, the myriad forms with which life is manifested and knowledge is constructed.

• Participation
  Participation is the value and strategy that defines the way in which the children, the educators, and the families are stakeholders in the educational project. Participation generates and nurtures the feelings and culture of solidarity, responsibility, inclusion: it produces change and the new cultures that contend with the dimension of the contemporary world and globalization.

• Listening
  Listening is an ongoing process that nurtures reflections, welcoming, and openness towards oneself and others; it is an indispensable condition for dialogue and change.

• Learning as a process of individual and group construction
  Each child, like each human being, is an active constructor of knowledge, competencies, and autonomies, by means of original learning processes that take shape with methods and times that are unique and subjective in the relationship with peers, adults, and the environment.

• Educational research
  Shared research between adults and children is a priority of everyday life, an existential and ethical approach necessary for interpreting the complexity of the world, of phenomena, of systems of co-existence, and is a powerful instrument of renewal in education.

• Progettazione
  Progettazione is a strategy of thought and action that is respectful and supportive of the learning processes of the children and the adults; it accepts doubt, uncertainty, and error as resources, and is capable of being modified in relations to the evolution of the contexts.

• Organization
  The organization of the work, the spaces, and the time of the children and the adults is a structural part of the values and choices of the educational project.

• Environment, spaces, and relations
  The interior and exterior spaces of the infant-toddler centres and preschools are designed and organized in interconnected forms that foster interaction, autonomy, explorations, curiosity, and communication and are offered as places for the children and for the adults to research and live together.

• Professional development
  Ongoing professional development is both the right and the duty of each individual and of the group, and is included and taken into consideration in the work schedule and organized collectively in terms of its content, forms, and methods of participation of each individual.

• Assessment
  The assessment process is part of the totality of the aspects of scholastic life, including the children's learning, the professionalism of the personnel, the organization and quality of the service; it is understood and proposed as an opportunity to recognize and to negotiate the meanings and intentionalities of the educational project and is configured as a pubic action of dialogue and interpretation.

Read more in
Indications: Preschools and Infant-Toddler Centres of the Municipality of Reggio Emilia

In my own words:

• The Reggio Emilia philosophy is an ongoing educational project rooted in the transformatory perspective that learners (of all ages, backgrounds, and abilities) are important, serious, and active co-constructors of meaning-making, knowledge, cultures, communities, and relationships. Places of education can and should be about people becoming their best selves in society as much as they are a place of delivering facts and information.

• Children are powerful members of humanity.

• The Reggio Emilia philosophy is both small in that it is immediately tangible, and vast in that it is continually moving and always in the act of becoming.

To be in dialogue with, influenced or inspired by Reggio Emilia:

• You must be open to possibilities and willing to step into the worlds of other disciplines (design, language, philosophy, science, nature, etc). 

• You must be willing to look for connections and information that challenges and expands your understandings.

• You must embrace the dance between theories and practices, challenge hierarchies, and take an active role in merging and evolving these structures.

• You must be willing to take risks.

• You must be an advocate for social, political, and human rights and the role of democratic educational institutions in society, keeping in mind that advocacy exists on all scales.