Reggio Emilia is an approach to preschool learning named after the town where it originated in Italy.
Founder Loris Malaguzzi began the Reggio Emilia style based on the belief that every child is unique and will express their interests in many different ways.
This belief creates a co-learning environment where teachers learn with the children and work in a lateral relationship as opposed to a hierarchical one. That partnership is also intended to encompass the parents and community of each child.
Reggio Emilia also revolves around the children’s senses, relying on sight, sound, touch and even taste and smell to assist with learning. As a result, Reggio Emilia classrooms tend to look different than your average preschool with large common spaces, natural elements and lots of accessible and curiosity-sparking materials.
What are some tenets of the Reggio Emilia philosophy?
The Environment acts as the Third Teacher
The interior and exterior spaces of preschools are designed and organized in interconnected forms, and are offered to children and adults as places to live together and research. The environment interacts and shapes the learning experiences.
100 Languages of Children
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.
Open-ended Projects
Every child, like every human being, creates knowledge, competencies, and autonomies and may return to them over time.
Teacher as Researcher
Research, made visible through documentation, constructs learning, reformulates knowledge, is at the foundation of professional quality early childhood education.
Image of the Child
The Reggio Emilia pedagogy perceives the child as rich in potential, strong, powerful, competent, and connected to adults and other children.
Documentation
Evaluation is a process that structures the experience of education and of running the schools, part of every aspect of school life, and understood as a public act of dialogue and interpretation.
Children are taught from a very young age to respect their personalities, needs, and to feel empowered to express their ideas and feelings in various positive ways. Students explore their environments both inside and outdoors. Our students also engage with the arts, global experiences, and, in line with BCD’s Imagination Lab curriculum, lots of hands-on project based learning.