Reading Matters Winter 2018

Rights of Children (According to the Reggio Approach) The concept of the needs of a child in the United States are regarded as rudimentary when compared to Reggio Emilia. They are the basic needs of survival, such as eating and going to the bathroom. It is this differentiation of how “needs” are considered, that makes the Reggio Emilia Approach so different. In the approach, the basic needs of a child are to have relationships with other children, learn to be able to dress and eat by

Cultural Differences Over the three-week span, the South Carolina pre-service teachers were fully immersed into the new, uniquely different culture in Reggio Emilia. Embedded, not only into the classroom, but also the everyday culture was the importance of the student and the student’s needs. The teachers in Reggio cared for each student in a way that was most appropriate for that individual. Even in some schools that lacked funds, these needs were met through creative expression and art.

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themselves, and building up self-awareness. When asked, a Reggio teacher stated, “For us, this is important, a child must grow up and be able to have autonomy and identity.” Being self-sufficient, is greatly valued and has transformed from the needs of a child to their rights. As explained by a panel of teachers in Italy, “the child has the right to individuality and creativity; they have the right to learn how to take care of themselves.” In the Reggio Emilia Approach, it is believed that children should decide what and how they learn, not the teacher or a mandated

While in Reggio, the pre-service teachers made many of these observations in an elementary school. The school could not afford workbooks for each child, however, the students created their own. After the completion of each handout, the students cut out their work and pasted it into a notebook. The teacher did not give any instruction when doing so, but instead, students as young as six and seven years old were left with the task of creating a workbook.

Reggio student artwork demonstrating the levels development

curriculum. The panel further explained, “the child has a stake in what is being taught, should have a say in what he/she learns, and that the child’s curiosity should lead to the instruction put forth by the teacher.”Teachers are not obligated to align teaching with standards or readiness guidelines. This is a “vastly different way of conceptualizing how we think about teaching and young children in the United States.” (Wurm, 2005, pg. 17). Teachers try to support the creativity of the individual child and strive to not make assumptions on how a child should learn. Through the Reggio Emilia Approach, children are able to express themselves and investigate their environment through any“language,”or type of expression, they desire. This variety in expression is seen early in Malguzzi’s hundred languages of children, where students can use words, drawing, painting, sculpture, music, dance, collage, and shadow play to express themselves. These arts allow for the children to make sense of their world through experiments, role-play, making messes, and singing songs. Through this fantasy and imagination, children can learn what way works best for them individually, and what they enjoy the most. This showcases just how highly they stress their core values of autonomy and identity. The arts have become so important to these school systems, that it is a huge part of the child’s needs as they explore literacy. The head teacher at a school stated,“The arts are used to make connections in the learning process,”and“to support the creativity of the individual.”The art of the children is a guide to what students are interested in and connects concepts together. The children use art not as a need, but as right especially when it comes to literacy.

What was noteworthy was that these homemade books were filled with pages of color and little personal notes in the columns. This gave the children the opportunity to express themselves in an artistic way while infusing ownership and comprehensive evidence of literacy. It was not directly stated that it was literacy time, as in the United States, it was just understood as one of the hundred languages. Contrary to an American style education, Reggio’s pedagogical methods are more concerned with the different ways in which each child can produce success, and are less concerned with measuring this success through standardized testing. In the United States, educators are so busy teaching the students information, and the teachers measure it on how well the students can reiterate it back in multiple-choice or open-ended tests. However, in Reggio, they measure each student’s fluency in a different way to ensure their understanding of the information which they are learning. Student progress is documented, and deep consideration is put into evaluations. This is achieved by teaching methods as well as the environment. For example, in a first-grade Reggio classroom during a math test, the atmosphere greatly differed from what would occur in a traditional American classroom. There was no silence, but instead, a hum rang throughout the room as the students completed their tests. Some students read each problem aloud to themselves, while others completed it standing up from their

Reading Matters | Volume 18 • Winter 2018 | scira.org | 23

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