Reggio Emilia and Contributions to Early Childhood Education

Reggio Emilia and Contributions to Early Childhood Education
Name
Institutional Affiliation
Reggio Emilia and Contributions to Early Childhood Education
Introduction
Reggio Emilia is a school in Northern Italy that local parents built and operated prior to 1945. With the involvement of Loris Malaguzzi in 1945, a radical approach to transform the early childhood education was fashioned through the cooperation of parents and teachers (Biroli et al., 2017). This system was contrary to the state-sponsored system, but by 1963, the local municipality provided financial support to the approach. Reggio Emilia schools require teachers’ participation, a pedagogista, and atelierista, making the implementation of the system costly to most schools in the United States (Biroli et al., 2017). Pedagogista will work with teachers to identify experiences meaningful to children, help them learn more and plan further experiences. Atelierista, or the art director, assists children to express their knowledge and interests in different media such as clay models, drawings, and paintings. For about 3 years, teachers will stay with the same group of children to understand them better and their families. In this paper, the contributions of Reggio Emilia schools to the Foundations of Early Childhood Education are discussed and any additions they have made to the traditional Education for Young Children.
Reggio Emilia Schools ensure a clear documentation of the learning process among children and projects within the school are ongoing contrary to the United States where projects are short-lived. The philosophy of the approach is predicated on a respect for children’s capacities, knowledge, and their innate drive to make sense of their individual world, and this is implemented through a method, which includes observation, representation, documentation, and registration (Biroli et al., 2017). In observation, teachers will be involved in a careful and continuous observation of the learning interests and experiences of their children. Information gained through observation is used to offer further opportunities for educational activities and learning. Representation involves children making use of art to come up with theories of how things work and how they relate to others. In documentation, the entire activities in experiential learning are recorded in videos, tapes, images, or teacher writings. Lastly, visitation involves a continuous recycling of the original experiences, developing new artworks and arriving at new conclusions. These projects can take several weeks or months to accomplish. This approach is thought to develop children’s knowledge, capacities, innate drive compared to the traditional system.
The system at Reggio Emilia schools helped shape a new form of curriculum, an emergent curriculum in Early Childhood Education that follows the child’s potential, interests, and experiences. The emergent curriculum covers content an...