The Lowry Center’s beliefs about young children are in line with the basic principles set forward by the Reggio Emilia Approach. This approach originated in a municipally sponsored early childhood school in Reggio Emilia, Italy. This highly developed approach has become a point of reference and a guide for many educators throughout the world.

The following principles guide the Reggio Emilia Approach and highlight how this approach is used at the Lowry Center.

Basic Principles

Image of the child

All children have preparedness, potential, curiosity, and interest in engaging in social interaction, establishing relationships, constructing their learning and negotiating with everything in their environment. Teachers are deeply aware of children’s potentials and construct the environment accordingly.

Children’s Relationships and Interactions Within a System

Each child in relation with family, other children, teachers, the environment and the wider society is the focus of education.

The Three Subjects of Education: Children, Parents, and Teachers

In order for children to learn, their well-being has to be guaranteed. This sense of well-being is connected with that of parents and teachers. Children’s rights and needs should be recognized. Children have a right to high-quality care and education that supports the development of their individual potentials. Parents’ rights to be involved in the life of the school and teachers’ rights to grow professionally are respected.

Role of Parents

Parents are an essential component of the program. Parents participation takes on many and varied forms and is expected and supported.

Role of Space

Arrangement of the physical space in addition to welcoming those who enter the school, fosters communication and relationships. The arrangement of fixtures and materials encourages choice, problem solving and discoveries. The learning space is full of children’s work - in the classroom, halls, bathrooms, and more.

The Value of Relationships and Interaction of Children in Small Groups

Teachers offer the possibility for children to be with the teachers and many of the other children, with just a few of them, or even alone when they need a private place to stay by themselves. Small groups of two, three, four, or five children provide possibilities for focusing, hearing and listening to each other, developing curiosity and interest, asking and responding to questions. This provides opportunities for negotiation and communication. This type of grouping also enables the emergence of cognitive conflicts that can initiate a process in which children construct new learning together.

Role of Time and the Importance of Continuity

Children’s sense of time and their rhythms are considered in planning and carrying out activities and experiences. Because teachers have time to discuss and interact with each other they get to know children and their particular characteristics. Every effort is made to provide continuity of staff.

Teachers as Partners

Teachers observe and listen to children closely as they plan for experiences. This enables them to act as a resource for children as they ask questions and discover children’s ideas, hypotheses, and theories. The role of the teachers is one of continual research and learning process. This process takes place with the children and is embedded in team cooperation. This provides for continuous individual and group professional growth.

Cooperating and Collaboration

Teachers work in teams in each program to gather information about work children have done by means of documentation, discussion, observation and assessment. Teachers are provided with ample time in their schedule for meetings, preparations, parent conferencing, and in-service training. To support and meet the needs of the children and families, teachers use planning time to offer high quality experiences for children.

Many Languages of Children

Children can explore various art materials, such as painting easels, inventor’s box, art table, and a variety of writing and art tools. This use of media is not a separate part of the curriculum but an inseparable, integral part of the whole cognitive/symbolic expression involved in the process of learning.

Power of Documentation

Transcripts of children’s words and discussions, photographs of children engaged in activities, and representations of their thinking and learning using many medias are arranged on the walls of the classroom to document children’s work. Benefits of documentation can include:

· Making parents aware of children’s experiences

· Maintaining parent involvement

· Allowing for teachers to understand children better

· Evaluating children’s work

· Providing a venue for children to recall and value their own work and the process of that work

· Facilitated communication and exchange ideas among educators.

Emergent Curriculum

The curriculum is not established in advanced. Teachers express general goals and make hypotheses about what learning may occur in activities and projects. Then, after observing children in action, teachers compare, discuss, and interpret their observations. They make choices about what to offer and how to sustain the children in their exploration and learning. In fact, the curriculum emerges in the process of each activity or project and is flexibly adjusted accordingly through continuous dialogue among the teaching team and the children.

Projects

Projects often provide a basis for children’s and teacher’s learning experiences. They are based on the strong conviction that learning by doing is of great importance. By discussing and revisiting experiences, understanding, knowledge construction and ownership of concepts can occur. Ideas for projects originate from teachers and children as they express interests and construct knowledge together. Projects can last a few days to several months. They may start either from a chance event, a problem posed by one or more children, or an experience initiated directly by the teaching team.

Conclusions

The Reggio Emilia Approach allows us to support the basic rights of children. These rights are:

· To realize and expand all their potentials while receiving support by adults who value the children’s capacity to socialize

· To receive and give affection and trust

· To have adults ready to help them by sustaining the children’s own constructive strategies of thought and action rather than by simply transmitting knowledge and skills.

The rights of parents to participate actively and of free will in the experience of growth, care, and learning of their own children is also valued. This participation is vital to the sense of security for children and parents. Parent participation is an essential part of working together, sharing values, ideas, and content of education.

The right of teachers to contribute to the content of knowledge, objectives, and practice of education is supported through a network of collaboration. The learning environment is always open to professional growth and research.

“Respect for these rights will bring mutual and shared benefits for children, parents, and teachers. This makes it possible for all to construct learning together and renders the school an amiable place that is welcoming, alive, and authentic.” (Hendrick, 1997, p. 25).

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This information is taken from First Steps Toward Teaching the Reggio Way, by Joanne Hendrick (Ed.), (1997) Prentice Hall, Inc.: Upper Saddle River, NJ.