Reggio Emilia Approach; Warp and Weft
- DaunYorke
- Jul 5, 2015
- 6 min read
Curriculum Direction and minding threads
A child’s education is like one long tapestry of complex patterns and intricate thread work. This tapestry is interconnected and threads, like the warp of a weaving, stay in place through the developmental stages of the child’s education. When moving from one educational stage to another, from the early years to primary and on to middle school, the child does not abandon the original tapestry she is working on and start another but rather she continues to weave on a continuum. The weft (threads inserted over and under the warp) may change texture and pattern along the way and the rhythm of the weaver may change but connections are constant and the child is the weaver who keeps on weaving on the same warp.
My work as a Curriculum Director in a three-program International Baccalaureate school is about minding threads, working alongside divisional coordinators, principals and teachers. Together, we ensure that the thread basket is full and that the student is supported as she weaves her own educational tapestry. For the child weaver to thrive, elements of her education have to move together, this is the weave of vertical articulation. Tracing threads is important work and by carefully studying the rhythm of the weave, we can help the child to reinforce her own tapestry. There are times when threads get unraveled and tangled in knots; this is inevitable, this is part of learning. Frustration will happen, growth will happen as our young weaver learns self-management and skills of patience and resilience.
Creative Commons Deed CC0
The Reggio Emilia Approach, warp and weft
This June, I was fortunate to attend the North American Reggio Emilia Alliance Conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Our Early Learning Centre in Korea has done much work, embedding a Reggio Emilia Approach over the past couple of years and I needed to learn more. The early years are an integral part of every child’s education. If we are to compare a child’s education to the weaving of a tapestry, the early years are where the warp is put into place, where the child starts to push threads in and out and develop a relationship with the fibres.
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
For two and a half days in Pittsburgh, Filippo Chieli (atelierista) and Deanna Margini (pedagogista) from Reggio Emilia, Italy talked about the history, philosophy and projects in the schools of Reggio Emilia. They spoke in their native Italian and their words were masterfully and poetically translated throughout the days of the conference. Chieli and Margini talked about the importance of wonder in education and reminded us that play, creativity and discovery are central to early childhood education (and in my experience, essential to education at all levels). Many times they quoted Loris Malaguzzi, who developed the Reggio Emilia approach to education and the The Hundred Languages of Childhood. The hundred languages reminds us that a child’s tapestry should take on a multitude of mediums and encompass many forms, including forms that may not have even been invented yet. The thread basket at the school expands, taking on dimensions of sound, movement, reflection, shape, colour to support the hundred languages.
The Hundred Languages of Childhood
The child
is made of one hundred.
The child has
A hundred languages
A hundred hands
A hundred thoughts
A hundred ways of thinking
Of playing, of speaking.
A hundred always a hundred
Ways of listening of marveling of loving
A hundred joys
For singing and understanding
A hundred worlds
To discover
A hundred worlds
To invent
A hundred worlds
To dream
The child has
A hundred languages
(and a hundred hundred hundred more)
But they steal ninety-nine.
The school and the culture
Separate the head from the body.
They tell the child;
To think without hands
To do without head
To listen and not to speak
To understand without joy
To love and to marvel
Only at Easter and Christmas
They tell the child:
To discover the world already there
And of the hundred
They steal ninety-nine.
They tell the child:
That work and play
Reality and fantasy
Science and imagination
Sky and earth
Reason and dream
Are things
That do not belong together
And thus they tell the child
That the hundred is not there
The child says: NO WAY the hundred is there--
Loris Malaguzzi
Founder of the Reggio Approach
Reggio Emilia offers a truly constructivist approach to early childhood education. Throughout the three days at the NAREA conference in Pittsburgh, stories and documentation were shared of young children leading the learning, engaging in self-directed projects that are supported by teachers, pedagogistas and atelierista (resident artists). This constructivist approach, where educators walk alongside the children, resonates with me and speaks to best practice (at all levels). In my own work as a teacher and from years of observing teaching and learning in the schoolhouse, I know that learning at best is co-constructed, a social endeavor where children learn through interacting with one another and the teacher. Chieli and Margini reminded us that education (weaving) is communal and at the centre of the classroom is a community tapestry that children co-weave together. This community weaving can be spectacularly complex and informs and adds layers of experience and understanding to every child’s individual tapestry.
The Reggio Emilia Approach utilizes an emergent curriculum, one that is responsive to and led by the learners. As a teacher and an IB workshop leader, I have found that the most transformative educational experiences for the children/participants (from early years through to adults) sometimes happen when we are able to abandon (well constructed, well intended) plans and move in new directions, initiated by the learners. Embracing the emergent curriculum (and being completely responsive to the learners) is something that an educator gains confidence with over time.
The emphasis of this conference and of the Reggio Emilia Approach is on early childhood education but I believe that this is a relevant and powerful model that can be adopted at all levels. In the Middle School, Secondary and at the University, there is much to be learned from this passion-driven, student-centred approach to education. If we want to empower learners, let’s have them fully engage and encourage them to be imaginative, master weavers, pursuing their interests and researching their passions. Researchers at Harvard’s Project Zero have been looking at the Reggio Inspired Approach from preschool to high school since 1997 and have documented examples of this work in Visible Learning. This research looks at the aspect of documentation that is an important part of the REA.
I have been an IB Diploma Coordinator and teacher in three schools over the last eleven years, working with students in their last two years of secondary school as they navigate course selections, academic directions, final examinations and university applications. From the outside, people may assume that all of the emphasis of the final two-years of secondary school is on exams and final outcomes (measured from the outside,) but I have witnessed and supported learning that ties in closely with the Reggio Emilia Approach at this level. There is room for powerful project based, student-led, passion-inspired learning in the final years of secondary school. The tension of the weaving may become tighter but the child (now a young adult) is forging her own path and ideally pursuing her own passions, continuing to make meaning and weave differently but with abandon. Play, imagination, wonder are found in different forms for the child as she advances through school. The older child, full of wonder and creativity continues her weaving, despite external pressures and challenges. This is where true resilience is accessed as the child persists, keeping many of the hundred languages alive. The warp has remained constant, the weft may have gone through major transformations of colour, texture, form and rhythm but those solid threads, tied into place securely so many years earlier have kept the tapestry vital and connected.
Daun Yorke
This post was inspired by the presentations by Filippo Chieli and Deanna Margini at the North American Reggio Emilia Alliance Conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Their words and a visit to The REA Cyert Center for Early Education at Carnegie Mellon demonstrated the possible.
Thanks to Pam Castillo (Early Learning Center Principal) who opened the doors of Reggio Emilia to me and to students and teachers at Busan International Foreign School.
Thanks to Luke Homitsky (Artist-In-Resident at Yew Chung International School of Shanghai) who cracked open the door, underlining connections between Reggio Emilia and the work we were facilitating together with IB Diploma Programme Visual Arts students at YCIS, between 2006-2010).
Recommended Readings on Reggio Emilia from my expanding library:
Interpreting the Reggio Emilia Approach In Schools by Carol Anne Wien
By Mara Krechevsky, Ben Mardell, Melissa Rivard, Daniel Wilson
By Leila Gandini, Lauren Hill , Louise Cadwell and Charles Schwall
Reggio Children,Italy,1999
Vea Vecchi, Mirella Ruozi, editors, Reggio Children Publications, Italy, 2015
Comments