This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Nov. 16, 2011 - When you walk into the Early Childhood Center in the Maplewood-Richmond Heights school district, besides the tall windows and the inviting blond wood of the floor, tables and chairs, you most likely will be struck by the long nature mural hanging on the wall.
To Jennifer Strange, the school's pedagogista, the drawings of plants and animals and insects, above and below the ground, are a perfect example of the use of the Reggio Emilia theory of educating young children: How teachers can listen to their students, figure out what their interests are, then mold those natural inclinations into lessons that instill in the students skills they can use the rest of their lives.
Such a child-centered curriculum, Strange says, can be easily misunderstood as a system where willful children get to do whatever they want, whenever they want. Reggio Emilia, which began in Italy and has spread worldwide, is far more structured, sophisticated and grounded in research, she said
"Sometimes people have the erroneous idea that the children go and do anything they want," Strange said. "That would be chaos. There has to be negotiation. It wouldn't work if they try to tell them to do things and don't try to have a conversation.
"We have a strong goal for children to develop autonomy, but autonomy only makes sense when you have responsibility connected to it."
Principal Cyndi Hebenstreit put it this way:
"I wanted things to slow down enough so children could stop and think and talk about their ideas, and I wanted a school where teachers could listen to the children, hear their ideas and give them the opportunity to play around and develop those ideas."
The result:
"We want to surround children with beautiful materials, and teach them how to use those materials, and we want to inspire them to do beautiful work."
The Reggio Approach
The Reggio Emilia approach to education began to develop in the 1940s in the Italian town of the same name. Concentrating on how children learn, rather than being confined by a rigid set of regulations, teachers, parents and most of all pre-school students share in determining what they will learn, and how.
When the children show an interest in a particular subject or activity, teachers are trained to listen for such clues, then convert that natural inclination into lessons and projects that help develop the basic skills that all students will need. Classroom spaces include several ateliers, or studios, where ideas can be transformed into activities like pieces of art or writings and observations of the world around them.
"Teachers really have to be listening intently to children to pick up on those ideas and interests," said Brenda Fyfe, dean of the school of education at Webster University, which trains students in the Reggio Emilia method.
"Then, they have to know enough about good learning and curriculum to frame the children's interests in term of what they need to learn."
In their training, the teachers learn to document what their students are doing through photography, journals, recordings and other means.
The environment of the school is another crucial part of the children's learning experience. Large windows help students connect with the world outside, and an open floor plan contributes to a feeling of connectedness among the various groups of students, fostering a sense of collaboration.
In general, Fyfe says, the approach is starkly different from the way Americans typically look at how schools should be run and students should be evaluated.
"In the Italian system," she said, "they are focused on continually assessing while they have children in the system. They don't believe that the data they can track through standardized tests are what they are trying to support.
"Often in our profession, we think of early childhood education as an investment for the future. From the Reggio Emilia perspective, it's not about an investment in the future; it's about giving children rights. It's not preparation for life. It is life."
As pedagogista -- the resource that other faculty members use to help develop their ideas -- Strange uses another term from Reggio Emilia to try to explain how the concept works: progettazione.
Acknowledging that there isn't an exact English translation, she said, indicates the need for teachers to "bring their knowledge together so they can create flexible ideas or curriculum. The flexibility is really important."
Birds, Insects, Plants and Pipes
As examples of how the system works, Strange pointed to two projects the students had help to spark, then create.
The first is the mural, depicting all sorts of living things coming back to life in the neighborhood around the pre-school after what Strange called last year's "yucky" winter, when the children had to spend more time inside than usual.
When their enforced curfew was lifted by spring, she said, what they found outdoors was the inspiration for what they eventually created in the classroom.
"Over the last five or six years," she said, "we have particularly studied how children respond to the out of doors. This is based on a strong belief that active young children deserve the right to be outside, and we wanted to be visible within the community of Maplewood and Richmond Heights.
"So we've taken children on walks in the neighborhood, with visits to local businesses, and definitely become more visible. At the same time, there has been a growing gardening program at the school, and children have become increasingly aware of plants and animals because we do a lot of gardening that attracts a number of birds and insects. That has allowed the children, with the teachers' support. To become very aware of nature in a very urban setting."
As the weather began to warm up, Strange said, and the children could spend more time outside, "they started noticing everything that was re-emerging. They noticed a family of field mice that live under some stones. They were seeing birds returning. They were seeing new growth on the trees and plants.
"Teachers were documenting all of this, documenting what children were saying. They were taking pictures of these interactions that children were having with the re-emergence of spring. We called it rebirth of a neighborhood. They began drawing their representation of the animals and the plant life, and these drawings became very important to the children."
The next step, she said was trying to figure out how to take the children's interest and make it into a collaborative project, using a range of skills and opening it up to a range of students. The answer they came up with was a mural of the neighborhood coming back to life.
"We offered the idea to the children, and they got excited. Then we said will this be just one classroom, or could it be all the classrooms? The children loved the idea, and the parents did too, that all of the children would have involvement with this mural, which I think is about 18 feet long. Every child in the school is represented in some way. It's an amazing mural that I think is quite unique to a pre-school."
Strange said the mural was a good example of what Reggio Emilia calls "the 100 languages of children" -- a way to make sure that the students have the ability and the chance to express themselves in a variety of forms, from language to art to music and more.
"It's the language of photography, the language of observation, the language of verbal description, in this case the language of painting and the language of drawing," she said. "How can we extend the possibilities of learning as far as they can possibly go?"
In the case of another project, it was the language of motion, and how to control the movement of a ball from one spot to another. Rube Goldberg would be proud.
"A teacher might have seen that he was going to have a number of active children," Strange said, "and he noticed that they were enjoying moving objects. The teacher and I started talking about this observation and how he could possibly engage the children with materials that would lend themselves to physical knowledge.
"We already had a good collection of tubes, and we started offering these possibilities to the children. Could they use the tubes to create a kind of a chute for balls to go through? Could these become games where the children are making connections to these kinds of activities with tubes, maybe as pipes that run to the sink. Big ideas started happening, and the children started designing pipelines that have now run into bigger thinking."
In both cases, Strange emphasized, the projects grew out of the children's interests, as noted and developed by the teachers.
"It's organic," she said. "They would never tell anyone to do anything. The lesson comes out of what we know to be a good learning experience and listening to children. If we had not been paying attention to what the children were saying, we may have missed this interest of theirs. But we pay close attention. This is really about life the way it is here."
From Italy to St. Louis County
Hebenstreit, who has been principal at the Maplewood-Richmond Heights center for 11 years, brought the bigger thinking of the Reggio Emilia system there in 2006, but she had become familiar with it several years before.
"The piece that spoke to me so much is that they consider the children to have good potential, and they believe the children have the ability to think about big ideas."
Parents were impressed as well. Besides the 127 children in the program now, 50 more are on the waiting list for the full-day program, Hebenstreit said, and 35 for the half-day program.
But believing in the ideas of Reggio Emilia and putting them into practice can be two quite different things, she acknowledged. That's where Strange's skills as the pedagogista came in.
"The work is open to anyone," Hebenstreit said, "but we knew we had to change our practices, from a well-intended pre-school, and we needed someone who had worked with this from a long time.
"We knew that if we didn't have someone on-site with us, working side by side with us, we wouldn't be able to change our practice. It's hard. If we didn't have someone there to push us, we would go back to what's comfortable.
"It's not anything you can read in a textbook and go day by day and implement. You have to have hard conversations with teachers. Teachers have to have those conversations among themselves."
To help make sure there is a pool of Reggio Emilia-trained faculty members to keep the work going, the pre-school works with Webster University, where Dean Fyfe first became familiar with the system while teaching at the university's campus in Iceland in the late 1980s.
"The Scandinavian countries latched onto this long before schools in the United States did," she said.
With funding from the Danforth Foundation, Webster was able to form a network of teachers who did intensive work in the system at a few schools in the St. Louis area, then began working with the early childhood center in Maplewood-Richmond Heights.
Webster also has partnered with the University of Modena in Reggio Emilia, with interns going back and forth to deepen their training. "They know in Italy the strong work we're doing here," Fyfe said, "so they invited us to be their only partner in the United States."
But, she added, that partnership doesn't mean the adjustment to the rigors and requirements of the Reggio Emilia system always goes smoothly.
"If you have already been in the teaching field for a while, and have learned to follow a curriculum rather than follow the children, it's a shift you have to make," she said. "We really work hard with our students to do a lot of observation and documentation, which is a critical part of the work."
When Students Get Older
Do the skills that students learn in their Reggio Emilia pre-school class carry over when they reach elementary school, middle school and high school? Fyfe says that's a question that a lot of American educators ask, and it hasn't been well documented here. But she can see in individual students the difference the training has made.
"These children have a strong sense of self," she said. "They are good thinkers. They have a great vocabulary, and they are good at problem solving.
"Years ago, parents would tell you that the adjustment students had to make was to learn how to play the game. You couldn't be a person who had any decision-making power -- you had to sit at a desk and be a learner. They got enough of an understanding of how things worked that they could play the game.
"Now, the world has come to recognize the Reggio approach as being the best in the world, so a lot has changed."
You can ask Jauda Harrel about that. She was in a Reggio Emilia classroom at the College School in Webster Groves when she was a young student. Now, at age 14, a freshman at Webster Groves High Schools, she says she definitely feels she views education more expansively from her classmates.
"It opens up your mind so you can see things in a different way," Harrel said. "You're confident, and you're more willing to try new things and be very active. Even though I left so young, I still remember all of that.
"I like to be interactive. I learn better if I'm doing something instead of the teacher lecturing me. Other students have to be talked to."
Her friends notice the different as well, she said.
"They always comment on me: You're so outgoing. You're always the first one to put your hand up and say I'll try this."
The adjustment wasn't always easy, Harrel said.
"The hardest thing I had to learn was structure," she said. "Not everything can be turned into a more fun version. Sometimes, things have to be the way they are."
And there was one more change she had to get used to, she recalled.
"I had to call my teachers by their last names."