Reggio Emilia Experience Inspires Foundational School Faculty

Last spring, Foundational School Director Amanda Irwin and Preschool 2 teacher Rachel Rich traveled more than 4,000 miles to Reggio Emilia, Italy, to deepen their understanding of an educational philosophy that has long influenced teaching and learning at Old Trail School.

This fall, they are bringing that experience back to campus.

During a recent professional development session, Irwin and Rich invited Foundational School faculty to experience firsthand some of the ideas they explored in Italy, transforming teachers into learners and encouraging them to consider how thoughtfully designed experiences can invite curiosity, creativity and discovery.

The Reggio Emilia philosophy begins with a powerful view of children: they are capable, curious and full of ideas. Rather than viewing learning as something delivered from teacher to student, the approach recognizes children as active participants who construct understanding by exploring their surroundings, asking questions, forming relationships and expressing their thinking in many different ways.

Italian educator and Reggio Emilia founder Loris Malaguzzi described these many forms of expression as the “hundred languages of children.” A child might communicate an idea through drawing, movement, building, storytelling, dramatic play, conversation or countless other forms. The role of the teacher is not always to prescribe the path or provide the answer, but to create rich environments where those possibilities can emerge.

Teachers Become the Learners
Irwin and Rich put that philosophy into practice during the faculty session with a deceptively simple invitation: explore the human eye.

Teachers were given minimal instruction and a variety of materials, leaving them free to observe, interpret and represent what they saw. The results were as varied as the people who created them. No two interpretations looked alike and there was no single “right” response.

That was precisely the point.

When children are given the time, materials and freedom to approach an idea from their own perspective, learning becomes more than completing a predetermined task. They make decisions, test possibilities, solve problems, communicate ideas and discover new things about themselves and the world around them.

The exercise left faculty with a question to carry into the school year: How might we create more experiences like this in our own classrooms?

Seeing Children More Clearly
The session also reinforced the importance of observation within the Reggio Emilia philosophy. When educators slow down and pay careful attention to what a child creates, says and does, they gain a richer understanding of how that individual child thinks and learns.

Every child sees the world differently. By resisting the urge to quickly categorize a response as right or wrong and instead becoming curious about the thinking behind it, teachers can nurture empathy, creativity and confidence while developing a deeper respect for each child as an individual.

For Irwin and Rich, sharing their experience in Reggio Emilia is about more than recreating the workshops they encountered in Italy. It is an opportunity to continue examining how the principles behind those experiences can inform teaching and learning at Old Trail.

And for our Foundational School faculty, that work begins with the same sense of curiosity we hope to inspire in our students: observing closely, asking questions and remaining open to where discovery might lead.