An Encounter with Reggio Emilia

Children and adults in transformation

Linda Kinney, Pat Wharton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781138808966
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317611745
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Classroom Management

The documentation of young children's learning plays a vital role in the pre-schools of Reggio Emilia. This leading edge approach to bringing record-keeping and assessment into the heart of young children's learning is envied and emulated by educators around the world.

The fully revised 2nd edition of An Encounter with Reggio Emilia is based upon a documentary approach to children's learning successfully implemented by Stirling Council in Scotland, whose pre-school educators experienced dramatic improvements in their understandings about young children, how they learn and the potential unleashed in successfully engaging families in the learning process.

This approach, which is based on careful listening to children and observation of their interests and concerns, centres around recording and commentating on children's learning through photos, wall displays, videos and a variety of different media. The authors include chapters on

• Why early years educators should use documentation as a means to enhance young children's learning
• The values, principles and theories that underlie the 'Reggio' approach
• How to implement documentations into any early years setting, with real-life case studies and hints for avoiding common pitfalls
• How to involve, inspire and enthuse familiar and the wider community

This text is an important read for any individual working with young children or interested in the using 'The Reggio Inspired Approach' in their early years settings

1 Why the documentation approach to early learning?

DOI: 10.4324/9781315750309-7

Documentation can be seen as narratives of children's and teachers’ lives; they are a way of telling the story of one's contribution to a community.

(Dahlberg 1999: 182)

Why documentation?

The documentation approach to early learning in Stirling was able to take root because it fell on fertile ground in that it connected with a way of thinking and working that already existed within Early Childhood Services. An ethos of respect and participation between adults and children was established from the outset, with organisational and curriculum approaches based on children's rights and the belief that children should be at the centre of decisions about their learning and development.

A commitment to listening to children and consulting with them is core to curriculum thinking, development and practice in early childhood settings. This was greatly influenced by understandings gained from a Scandinavian trip in 1998 and, as a consequence, a range of methods to support children's participation is in place to ensure that their voices, their views and their understandings can be heard and made more visible, so that adults can respond appropriately.

Our belief is that children have the right to be heard and have important things to say and to tell us, but, as adults, we need to be able to understand the messages that children are giving to us.

Reading about inspirational practice in Sweden and New Zealand through books like Advanced Reflections of Reggio Emilia, Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care and Te Whariki, the New Zealand curriculum document, made us review the approaches we were taking.

Visiting Reggio Emilia made a significant impact on us and caused us to reflect more deeply on how we could be more effective in hearing, seeing and feeling what children were communicating to us.

Our desire was to make the process of how children learn and what they were learning more visible. As part of this process, we began to ‘document’, to systematically record through a range of media resources including photographs, videos, journals and audio recordings what children were telling us. It was this aspect of the process and the methods of listening to children that led us to a new stage and to new and deeper understandings about:

• how children learn and construct meaning;
• the amazing ability and potential of children;
• ourselves as adult learners and our interactions with children and with each other;
• the cultural importance of families and communities.

And so began our encounter with ‘documentation’. An encounter already in process through core curriculum practices like consulting with children and listening to them but in need of deepening through specific guiding principles which we understood, through our connections with Reggio Emilia, to be significant for its further development.

These guiding principles are as follows:

The rights of children should be respected

This includes the fundamental right to be heard and to have views taken into account. It means that we should not only understand the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, ¹ but be able to demonstrate, to show actively and positively in our policy and practice, how this can be achieved.

States Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child … The child shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child's choice.

Adults should be able to listen and respond

Children give us information in many different ways. It is important to ensure effective ways of supporting children to communicate their viewpoints and for us to learn the many different ways of ‘hearing’ children. This means actively listening to and observing children's reactions and responses. It means taking appropriate action that is visible, that can be recorded, shared, discussed and reviewed with others. It also means that we must acknowledge and confront power relations between children and adults.

Taking action takes courage. Taking action as result of listening to children means sometimes having to change decisions already made. It sometimes shows up gaps in our adult thinking and understanding. Taking action means that we have to recognise and acknowledge this or admit that we were wrong and, perhaps more importantly, that we do not have all the knowledge.

(Kinney quoted in Clark et al. 2005: 122)

Children as participators

Encouraging choice supports children's participation in practice as it offers, in particular, opportunities for independence and interdependence; it offers time to think, to interact, to relate and to make connections. This means recognising that a wide range of opportunities and experiences should be available to support children's participation and to assist the ways in which children learn and engage with each other and with adults.

Children as active social agents

This includes recognising that children are active participants in their own learning. It means putting children at the heart of the learning process, ensuring that they are fully involved in planning and reviewing their learning alongside the early educators, that they can engage in meaningful exchanges with adults and other children in such a way as to extend their ideas and viewpoints.

Children as meaning makers

Listening to children provides us with many valuable insights and understandings. It helps us to focus our attention on the ways in which children make sense of their world. We witness how children make connections, develop theories, construct hypotheses through the range of experiences and activities offered to them. From our careful observations and dialogue, we understand that children naturally and actively engage in the search for meaning and, in doing so, are in a constant process of constructing meaning.

Children as co-constructors of learning

The methods and approaches that support children to be central to their own learning mean that early educators can see more clearly the processes of learning, the strategies that children use and their individual personalities and interests. As educators guide and scaffold children's learning, new understandings are reached, including that the adult's hypothesis on what children are learning may not be the experienced learning of the child. The ability of the early educator to ‘tune in’, to interact meaningfully with children and other educators, means that, essentially, space is given to children to construct their learning alongside the adult and that children and adults can then become co-researchers and co-constructors of learning.

The pedagogy of listening

Reflecting on methods of listening to children has meant a new appreciation of what it means to listen. This has led us to contemplate and explore the multiple forms of listening, internal and external, and the complexities, both social and political, around listening. At the heart of these deliberations is Loris Malaguzzi's theory of ‘the hundred languages of children’ which offers to us a deeper understanding of listening as a ‘culture and as an approach to life’.

The Hundred Languages of Children

The child

is made of one hundred.

The child has a

hundred languages

a hundred hands

a hundred thoughts

a hundred ways of thinking

of playing, of speaking.

A hundred ways of listening

of marvelling of loving

a hundred joys

for singing and understanding

a hundred worlds

to discover

a hundred worlds

to invent

a hundred worlds

to dream.

The child has

a hundred languages

(and a hundred hundred hundred more)

but they steal ninety-nine.

The school and the culture

separate the head from the body.

They tell the child:

to think without hands

to do without the head

to listen and not to speak

to understand without joy

to love and to marvel

only at Easter and Christmas.

They tell the child:

to discover the world already there

and of the hundred

they steal ninety-nine.

They tell the child:

that work and play

reality and fantasy

science and imagination

sky and earth

reason and dream

are things

that do not belong together.

And thus they tell the child

that the hundred is not there.

The child says:

No way. The hundred is there.

(Malaguzzi 2000: 1)

The image of the child as rich and resourceful

Listening to children has changed the way in which we think about children. It has changed our understandings and perspectives about how and what children learn and our image of the child. We have been able to see more clearly the amazing potential of all children, their richness, their talents, their understandings and views of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• What is this book about?
• What have been our ongoing and current challenges?
• Sustaining pedagogical documentation through professional development contexts: to summarise
• Where does this leave us?
• 1 Why the documentation approach to early learning?
• 2 What do we mean by the documentation approach?
• 3 What does the documentation approach look like in practice?
• 4 Reaching new understandings
• 5 Reflections, and what next?
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index