The Reggio Emilia model has been critiqued for being overly feel-good and wishy-washy with a touch of hippy-dippy. But, uh, what is it? It's an approach aimed at increasing creativity and self-expression in early childhood.

Although, you never know…maybe one of you Shmoopers will be inspired and figure out how to apply the method of making art with feathers and pipe cleaners to college education.

Fingers crossed.

Rome, Milan, Reggio Emilia

Italy is known for fashion. Pasta. Gondolas. Gladiators. The Aeneid, Julius Caesar, and the Pope. But it's also the origin of a creativity-based schooling method for young children who don't know how to read things like The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra just yet.

 

If our classroom would look like this, we're down.

This method was developed by Loris Malaguzzi after World War II as a way to care for children while their parents went off to work. Named after the town of Reggio Emilia in the part of northern Italy where Malaguzzi lived, it's basically a system of ideas that focuses on how children construct knowledge of the world, ways they interact with people and things around them, and the value of spontaneous, playful self-expression in early education.

The Philosophy: The Hundred Languages of Children

The idea behind Reggio Emilia teaching is that kids who are encouraged to play, create, and express themselves will be better at dealing with tough decisions and ambiguous situations later in their lives. That doesn't 100% mean that making an airplane out of twigs and tongue depressors will make you a better accountant, but hey, maybe it means you'll be better at dealing with the people around you and the weird problems you face.

That's why one of the tenets of the method is "the environment is the third teacher"—the space where a child learns impacts the lessons they'll take with them.

In other words, kids can understand the world around them more deeply if they grapple with it—yes, really grapple with it, like with hands-on activities, projects, and games. Using a range of materials and encouraging creativity, according to supporters of the Reggio Emilia method like the authors of this article, can help children learn how to collaborate with others, be creative in the way they face obstacles, and come up with their own ideas.

So what's the teacher for? The idea is that the teacher is there to help the kids explore, not grade creative projects with a fat red pen. The teacher can help kids gain awareness of patterns, relationships, and ways to look at the world. It's more about exploring than grading. And hey—that can be a lot of fun for the teacher, too. Click here to see more about the Reggio Emilia method views the roles of the teacher and the child.

All this enhances not only kids' ability to build a sweet castle out of play-doh, blocks, and TP rolls, but also increases self-reflection and problem-solving throughout their lives. That's why another slogan is "the hundred languages of children": it's the idea that drawing, sculpting, dancing, writing poetry, and a million (well, 96) other forms of communication are just as important for kids as reading and writing.

The Upshot: Constructing a Funner World

Is "funner" a real word? If we're going to subscribe to the Reggio Emilia method for the day, we don't care. It's creative and it gets the idea across, so we can learn something by saying it.

The goal of Reggio Emilia is not just to help kids learn in the passive-absorption-of-knowledge sense; it also uses something called the "constructivist approach," which is supposed to help children "develop theories, negotiate learning, and merge thoughts together, thereby building knowledge and understanding" (see this Reggio Emilia school website for our source and more about the constructivist approach).

Anyway, this method respects children as having ideas that may not be as complex as grown-up ones, but are worth listening to and encouraging. This fits into a whole Children's Rights movement represented, in part, by the North American Reggio Emilia Alliance.

So at the core of this idea is an ethical view of childhood that's meant to create more ethical adults, too. With that, we'll leave you with a quote by Loris Malaguzzi himself:

"The pleasure of learning, of knowing, and of understanding is one of the most important and basic feelings that every child expects from the experiences he confronts alone, with other children, or with adults. It is a crucial feeling which must be reinforced so that the pleasure survives even when reality may prove that learning, knowing, and understanding involve difficulty and effort. It is in this very capacity for survival that pleasure is transformed into pure joy."

Now ain't that inspiring?