Reggio Emilia: A Western Model

Much like Vygotsky, who believed that all thinking was inseparable from social and cultural context, Reggio Emilia is inseparable from its place of origin in Western Europe — specifically in the eponymous town in Italy from which it emerged.

The pedagogical framework is most famously explained in a book called The Hundred Languages of Children (1993), in which its founder, Loris Malaguzzi, was interviewed. The principles of the approach are as follows:

• Children must have some control over the direction of their learning;
• Children must be able to learn through experiences of touching, moving, listening, and observing;
• Children have a relationship with other children and with material items in the world that they must be allowed to explore;
• Children must have endless ways and opportunities to express themselves.

As you can see from the principles, the approach is very strongly child-centred. It also uses terms like “explore,” and there is a strong link with children engaging with one another, nature, and materials in a more self-directed, independent manner than what traditional Western schooling with rows of desks had once dictated.

There are many cultural values here, but they do not easily map onto a purely Western approach. While the child-directed philosophy emphasizes child autonomy and their own rich and varied abilities or lenses on the world (“the hundred languages” [1993]), it also integrates social and cultural embeddedness. These values are often associated with collectivism, but here, we see the limitations of such terms, which may oversimplify complex cultural realities.

In northern Italy, a small city that generated a pedagogical approach based on Malaguzzi was then developed over the years to incorporate ideas from other prominent thinkers in cognitive development. The influences were varied: constructivism and Piaget from Western Europe, Vygotsky from Eastern Europe, and Howard Gardner’s (1983) Theory of Multiple Intelligences from the United States (think of the parallel between the intelligences and hundred languages).

What many may focus on from Reggio Emilia is local relevance, nature, and the community. Indeed, two of my colleagues have explored Reggio in very different contexts from northern Italy (Junehui Ahn in South Korea and Patricia Falope in Nigeria).

Reggio Emilia in Korea and Nigeria

Just as Vygotsky’s theory has been identified as applicable beyond its origins in Russia due to its cultural and contextual relativity, Reggio Emilia has also been adopted (and adapted) all over the world.

Junehui Ahn (2023) considered the cultural implications of adopting the approach outside of Italy in her ethnographic study of a preschool in Korea. Ahn speaks to the complexity of the model in its values and how there were some, if subconscious, clashes with Korean RECE values in practice. She offers a fascinating and nuanced commentary on what this looked like as she spent a year visiting the preschool and observing all facets of programming, formally, informally and transitionally, in a play-based model adapted from Reggio Emilia.

Video: Models of Early Learning: Junehui Ahn (duration: 6:17)

The approach was relevant to my Nigerian-Canadian collaborator, Patricia Falope. When Ms. Falope looked at a pre-primary public school in a city like Abuja or a Nigerian village, she saw the potential of Reggio’s specifics emerge in very different forms in these communities. That is, through the specific, she has derived more universal principles that enable her to understand the local and thereby raise Indigenous voices in early learning in Nigeria  rooted in those features of local relevance, nature, and community.

Video: Models of Early Learning: Patricia Eno Falope (duration: 5:28)