An outsider’s view of Reggio Emilia
(This article was originally posted on the Bangalore Schools Facebook forum on 5 February, 2018)
I’ve been curious about the Reggio Emilia approach to education ever since I have heard about it. But reading about it didn’t paint a clear picture. What does “emergent curriculum” really mean? What are “the hundred languages of a child”? So I asked Rythm Aggarwal at The Atelier if I could be a fly-on-the-wall at her school for a day, just to get a sense of the learning process. She graciously agreed, and suggested that I spend two hours with them one morning. I’m sharing my observations in the hope that it may help parents who want to understand this philosophy better.
Orientation
Rythm gave me an overview of the usual day. The children reach the school at 8:30 am, have breakfast and settle down with a group activity. Then, from 10 am to 12 noon they are in their rooms. Each room has a selection of material that includes: props for pretend-play (sunglasses, scarves, hats), construction material (cardboard cylinders, plastic cubes, large wooden blocks, natural materials and magnetic tiles), material for reading, working with numbers and art. The complexity of the material increases with the age of the children. After lunch, the children usually work on a project. The children leave at 1:15 pm and the mentors spend the rest of the afternoon in planning for the next day(s).
The Reggio Emilia philosophy is all about following the child, so each day is different. Even though mentors plan things and have the larger learning objective in mind, the execution varies based on the child’s mood and interests. Children are encouraged to resolve conflicts amongst themselves and mentors step in at a later stage to aid the process.
In Newton’s tree
This room is for children in the age group 3.5 to 5+ yrs. Anuradha was the mentor. Over the next hour, I realized that there were parallel ‘flows’ in progress. Each child chose what she wanted to work with, and did so for a while, before moving on to something else. Sometimes it was working with concrete materials; sometimes it was pretend-play. The mentor acted as a co-learner, asking questions about what the child thinks is happening, what she interprets this object as, and so on. Sometimes children came together to work on the same material, and then they diverged again to work on separate activities. The following diagram illustrates some sample flows that I observed.
The above flowchart provides a zoomed-in view of a child’s learning process over just one hour. This process repeated day after day, week after week results in huge leaps in cognitive, social and emotional development over the year.
I was told that over the past 8 months of this term, M’s ability to collaborate, literacy skills like reading and writing, logical and numeric skills, problem solving and critical thinking skills have grown by leaps and bounds. When she first joined them, she used to resist work related to reading or writing. But now:
— She readily writes lists, letters, meeting notes within contexts that are meaningful to her
— She collaborates with more readiness and considers another’s point of view
— She figures out her own processes and methods to crack math and logical/ analytical problems
— She theorises about the world around her — “Since we have 2 legs and 2 eyes, so should spiders have 8 legs and 8 eyes.”
In Kipling’s corner
This room is for children aged between 3 to 3.5 yrs. The mentor here was Vidya, and Kavita was the attendant helping her. Rythm also joined them.
Vidya had just finished discussing letters of the alphabet with the children and suggested that they read a book together and spot the letters. The first page had a picture of a cat. Immediately, the children began crawling on all fours and miaowing their heads off! They became distracted and started playing with other material. Vidya realized that the mood was lost and did not push on with the story.
There was a lot more of pretend-play in this room. One child (A) went to a corner and lay down on the cushions. Three other children came over to ‘mother’ her. One said “bukhar ho gaya” (she has a fever). Vidya asked if they have taken A to a doctor and T solemnly nodded. She said A has “fever”, then it became an “insect-bite” and “allergy”! They fed her sips of “chocolate milk”, even “ajwain milk”!
Meanwhile, S and O picked up toy trucks. They wanted to go up to the loft to “deliver sand”. Rythm challenged them and asked them to display their “gate-pass” as a permit to enter. The two children thought about it for a bit and decided to pick the wooden tablets available around them as their “gate-pass”. She pretend-read the “gate-passes” and let them go up, accompanied by Kavita. They started a truck race up there.
By now, the children were getting hungry and cranky so Vidya said that it is time to eat.
At the piazza
The Atelier is an open plan space — with a double-height ceiling, a central piazza and ‘rooms’ that are sectioned-off areas with low partition walls. So there is clear line-of-sight all around. There are low tables and chairs set up in the piazza. The children brought their respective bags from their cubby-holes, washed their hands and began eating lunch. Anuradha ate with them and kept an eye on each child.
Some observations
- Respect is evident in the way mentors talk to children and vice-versa. Children address mentors by first names, and are very much at ease, hugging and kissing them spontaneously.
- When a child is “acting up”, say, toppling the chairs, the mentor enquires why she is doing that. Is there a reason? The tone is neutral, non-judgmental, and almost curious.
- A child is in control of his learning process. He decides what material he wants to work with, and for how long. Mentors do not intervene, unless his actions conflict with another child’s, in which case they make him aware of how he may be impacting others.
Wrap-up conversation with Rythm
I described what I had observed to Rythm and she elaborated further. Pretend-play is a very important process by which the child interprets her immediate environment. So, toddlers engage in role-playing family members because their sense of identity stems from their immediate caregivers. The older ones invent other games, eg. a ‘meeting’ that one child held with the mentor.
Pretend-play may seem trivial but it develops our ability for abstract thinking. Abstract thinking is what we use later when we learn Mathematics or Organic Chemistry. This makes sense. Just as interconnected cubes could be a ‘TV remote’ or part of a ‘tower’ in toddlerhood, so can ‘C’ represent the vertex of a triangle or the element Carbon in middle school!
The mentors select materials that are open-ended and can be used by the children in many ways. So blocks, tiles, pretend-play props are good materials. They also create materials and set-ups based on what the children talk about in their lives. For example, a child came back from Kabini National Park and went about saying “Shh…we’re on a safari!” So the mentors constructed a little jungle set-up with animals to build on that narrative.
The cycle here is that children interact with the environment → form a theory → test it → and then come up a new theory based on what they have observed. This is how babies learn, when they drop objects from the high chair, play peek-a-boo with a parent or taste everything they can get their hands on! This is how scientists learn too. So why do we abandon this method during the school years? Perhaps because it is not easy to implement. As a mere observer, I found it hard to keep track of what each child was working on through these two hours. For the mentor to not only follow, but also engage and build on each child’s learning track in real-time, is an astounding amount of effort.
Regardless of whether your child’s school follows Reggio Emilia philosophy or not, as a parent I think it is useful to learn about it, to understand how children interact with and interpret their environment.
Photo credit: The Atelier team
