Reggio in a Box

Reggio in a Box
Reflections on a visit to The Wonder of Learning; March 2015 

I took the MegaBus this March break with my thirteen year old daughter to New York City; while we were there, we were fortunate enough to have a tour of The Wonder of Learning exhibit from Reggio Emilia, located at Williamsburg Northside School in Brooklyn New York. I assured my daughter that this was important to me, and that she would find interest in the exhibit, which she did, and a guide obligingly arranged for us to join a group. During the previous ten years I had immersed myself in Reggio reading and groups in Ontario, and promoted aspects of the Reggio project to the best of my ability. Initially as my interest in Reggio surged I felt that I had found a structure within which to house the priorities that drive me, complete with concrete examples to look toward. Loris Malaguzzi’s Reggio philosophy is poetic, carried by robust metaphors and firmly grounded in contemporary educational theory. I have always been moved by the image of the first municipal school that he built with others in Reggio Emilia; bricks pulled by hand from the debris of the second world war to be used to form a place for children. My sentiments remain intact but I am all the same having hesitancies about aspects of the widespread Reggio embrace that seems to be taking place in North America. I primed myself with a re-reading of Richard Johnson’s essay “Colonialism and Cargo Cults in Early Childhood Education: Does Reggio Emilia really exist?” Johnson’s piece is a deep critique of Reggio with ambiguous conclusions but also frank recognition of the awe that Reggio seems to inspire. And I’ll come clean, I’ve heard myself describe it as “the closest thing to religion I have found”. 

Let’s just say that from the outset of the visit, I had an open mind but some questions all the same. I was curious to see how pedagogy would be curated; What would the exhibit look like? How would Reggio be packaged? Who would the audience be? How would this look to the uninitiated? 
 

Our visit began with practicalities; a meeting by the elevator to orient ourselves and go over basic protocol (Northside School is a functioning school), then a fire drill! Casual introductions follow, in my small group there is a woman who started a charter school and another who appeared to be involved with teacher training. The general discussion revolves around the work involved with systemic change needed to implement Reggio ideas into the public school system. Some of the discussion is positive, (the Mayor of New York had come to the opening and had recently provided substantial funding for early learning in NYC), and some of the talk was about challenges (how would they provide training for the teachers who would now be hired?). My daughter and I wander away to explore on our own and were able to allow broader impressions while quietly looking at the panels. The general aesthetic of the exhibit was familiar to anyone who has visited the Reggio Children website; it was well organized, tidy and presented information in a way that made sense. There were artifacts from the first Reggio exhibit “The Hundred Languages of Children” It had the solid look of a carefully prepared and well financed exhibit and one could almost see the numbered crates stowed away and ready to ship the exhibit to its next scheduled appointments; yes, the cargo. 

We let ourselves drift through the exhibit as we pleased, stopping if a panel held our attention. One of the first projects we spent time with was animated video documentation of a small group of boys creating clay hands that they were modelling after their own. They seemed comfortable with the technology, and skilled with the clay...my daughter commented on how lucky they were to have access to such a nice camera, and I noticed how adept they were at proportioning and fashioning the material, they’d had lots of previous “hand/eye” training I suppose. The Italian circus music was a lovely touch as well. 

I was pleased to see panels with work by pivotal contributors Gianni Rodari (author of “The Grammar of Fantasy”), and artist Alberto Burri. Rodari’s progressive notions of language and writing, and Burri’s materialist work (“alphabet of gestures”) seem to me to formative pieces of the Reggio project as we know it today. And here is where I risk (perhaps invite) rebuke from the Ranks: while Rodari and Burri’s work strikes me as foundational, some of the writing that now seeks to define Reggio today strikes me as reiterative...rooted in familiarity, but perhaps more problematic, striving with great desire for legitimacy. As we exited the Light and Shadows Atelier, our guide pointed out a list of curricular expectations that can be met by children who are working in the atelier. This organization of creative experience is part of the process of assimilation, of becoming a norm, but what is lost in that process? What of that utopian ideal? A couple of days after the visit I read of the migration of a group of experimental writers (Oulipo) from outliers to core curriculum in “Oulipo- A Primer of Potential Literature” by Warren Motte, and the characterization of that transformation seems applicable as well to Reggio. Noel Arnaud writes, “It’s physiognomy is changing as pedagogy installs itself in it’s veins. It’s personality is dissolving”. I understand how we need to structure and codify information in order to apprehend it and generate practical strategies; Elliot Eisner provides a handily succinct description of curriculum as: “ a useful organizing principle”.

Reggio has a number of codified precepts, (including Documentation, Relationship, Child as Collaborator, Environment as Third Teacher; Co-Construction of Knowledge...), and these are the building blocks of Reggio practice; they are becoming familiar, we speak of them with increasing ease and use them to the advantage of children. I think it is important as well to remember the initial bricks that were picked from the ground in Reggio Emilia;"they said it was never easy". That struggle is important to remember, because for many of us, while Reggio should be a “practical ideal”; it often appears as a glimmering mirage, packed into a box to tour the world.