Exemplary Practices 2008

Reggio Emilia — Unleashing the Child's Creativity

When Bobbi-Lynn Keating arrived at the Peter Green Hall Children's Centre in Halifax fourteen years ago, she felt as if she had come home. The Director of the Centre, Barb Bigelow introduced her to the Reggio Emilia approach to Early Childhood learning."It felt like a warm blanket," she says. "This was the approach I had been searching for."

So who was Reggio Emilia?

For those who don't know, the real surprise is that Reggio Emilia is a what, not a who. That is, a small town in the Tuscany region of Italy that found itself in a dilemma after the Second World War when all of its institutions, including the schools, were destroyed. The parents of the town needed to find a way to educate their children and do so expediently. The focus to this educational regimen is pre-school and primary.

The thinking is this: if learning is of interest to the child, it will be meaningful. Structuring this form of learning from a child's perspective also gives them some measure of control over their learning. This also means that the approach to learning as espoused by Reggio Emilia is continually evolving. There is no set curriculum. There are no finite learning outcomes. It is a holistic, organic approach to learning that allows children to express their creativity in the most fundamental and often sloppy and messy way.

For example, in Bobbi-Lynn Keating's class at Peter Green Hall, the children discovered an interest in crocodiles when some toy crocodiles were bought by a student teacher at a dollar store. The kids slept with the crocodiles, took them to lunch, to the playground and some took them home. In the library, there are encyclopedias so they looked up information on crocodiles. Children were given sketch books so they could draw crocodiles. They found out where crocodiles live, how big they grow and that crocodiles lay up to 80 eggs. The group went to the kitchen and asked the cook for 80 eggs, made a nest and filled it up discovering it was a lot of eggs. Crocodiles were then made or represented out of art materials like wire and string. Finally, the class created a display that documented the educational journey they took to discover crocodiles. The documentation consisted of text and pictures showing the transition from one stage of the project to the other. The display was posted on the wall for all to see. There was no fixed time for the crocodile project to be completed and no set direction in which it could go. The project was dependent on the interests of the children and what they wanted to explore.

What we see in this approach is the development of a sophisticated skill set. Children are encouraged to dialogue, critique, compare, negotiate and problem-solve. It is a project involving teamwork, decision-making and requires the use of physical materials. Reggio Emilia is very keen on documentation and these displays, such as the Crocodile project, form part of the body of work children undertake in a given year.

Over the past 14 years, Bobbi-Lynn Keating has learned the language of Reggio Emilia. She says: "I facilitate a program that embraces the children's interests, creating a learning environment that children interact with, keeping the learning relative and meaningful. When children are allowed to explore and research the things that are meaningful to them, it creates a lifelong foundation."