‘Intelligent’ open-ended materials are the driving force behind Loris Malaguzzi’s ‘pedagogy of listening’, Nicole Weinstein discovers

Loris Malaguzzi’s much-quoted poem 100 Languages starts, ‘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.’ The forms these ‘languages’ can take are endless: dancing, dreaming, questioning, singing, reasoning, imagining, exploring, painting, sculpting and experimenting.

The educational philosophy forms the bedrock of the Reggio Emilia approach, founded by Malaguzzi in 1963 when the first municipal pre-school opened in the region of Reggio Emilia, a small wealthy city in northern Italy, where he grew up.

Today, there are about 70 pre-schools and infant-toddler centres in the city of Reggio Emilia which form a network of schools operated by the local authority and Reggio Children, the international centre. The schools are world-renowned and receive over 4,000 visitors on study tour each year.

Pedagogical consultant Martin Pace set up Reflections Nursery in Worthing, West Sussex, along with Linda Thornton and Pat Brunton, in 2006, drawing on inspiration from Reggio Emilia after attending his first study tour in 2003. He has been on ten more since, and after selling Reflections in 2019, he now supports nurseries and schools to work with the approach.

He says, ‘For me, it’s a way of thinking. It begins with a strong image of the child as powerful, competent and capable. It’s based on a set of values which are political and social, such as open dialogue and mutual respect, which are under threat around the world today.

‘When those values are applied to pedagogy, it results in what they often refer to in Reggio as a “pedagogy of listening”. This is deeply listening to young children; valuing their ideas; supporting them sensitively and thoughtfully and giving them space, time and resources to deepen their learning.’

Malaguzzi was born in Correggio, northern Italy, in 1920 and lived and worked in the region until his death in Reggio Emilia in 1994. He was a thinker, teacher, orator and psychologist and was responsible for the collaborative nature of the approach. He drew from many of the great pedagogical thinkers, including Vygotsky, Montessori, Piaget, Isaacs, Bruner and Gardner, alongside artists, writers, philosophers, poets and scientists. There was also a history of many ground-breaking women in Reggio who played a vital role in establishing this educational provision in a country recovering from occupation, war and fascist ideology. Together, they all formed part of his ‘chorus of many intelligences’.

Resources, referred to as ‘materials’, are critical to the Reggio approach. They are open-ended and both natural and man-made. Much time and consideration is given to the choice of materials and the design and layout of the environment, and ‘there should be nothing in the environment which doesn’t have a purpose’, according to Pace.

‘What this looks like in practice is spaces where children’s ownership and authorship is evident. When you work with open-ended materials and value children’s work, you can see the effects of children’s voices being heard physically in every space,’ he explains.

In Reggio, nurseries and schools get their materials from a giant recycling store known as Remida, where the resources are beautifully presented. ‘It’s like visiting an art gallery of scrap resources, or as they call them in Reggio, “intelligent materials”,’ Pace says.

The atelier – a studio, workshop or laboratory – is a key characteristic of the design of a Reggio centre. It’s ‘the place of what is possible’, the place for creative thinking, research and discovery. It is in this space that creativity is supported and children are provided with open-ended resources and experiences.

Lighting is also an important aspect of Reggio Emilia-inspired settings, with a lot of thought going into ensuring that the lighting produces a calm, focused environment. Natural light, lamps and projections are often used to give children opportunities to explore light, dark and shadow.

The use of digital technology is another set of languages for the children. Twenty years ago in Reggio, they worked with overhead projectors and lightboxes as tools for creative expression. Today, they have digital cameras, projectors, iPads and scientific equipment.

CASE STUDY: Reflections Nursery and Small School, Worthing

The idea that children’s rights should be respected and that they should have the opportunity to explore their ideas and take ownership and authorship of the spaces they inhabit is central to the Reggio approach.

‘Environments should demonstrate children’s thinking: their cognitive processes,’ explains Reflections’ Pace. ‘At Reflections, for example, we set up a space for the three-year-olds, based on our observations of some complex and physical outdoor games they were exploring. The idea was that one of the rooms indoors could offer a continuation of these experiences. Kate Grant, the senior educator working with three-year-olds, hung a ball on string from the ceiling in the middle of the room and in a smaller part of the room we set up some smaller-scale board games such as chess and drafts on a small table to see what they might make of them. There was nothing else set up in the room.

‘The children began by bringing in props to use with the hanging ball and created a circuit of physical games, balancing, then dodging the ball and jumping off steps. Some children found the smaller board games interesting and wanted to incorporate board game concepts into the larger space.

‘Eventually, they created their own extraordinarily complex game which they defined as, “The aim of the game is trickiness, really trickiness.” The complexity and depth of the game left the adults baffled, but the children worked on the game for weeks, constantly changing, refining and adding detail, creating and sharing rules until it took over the entire floor of the room.

‘We find again and again that during the hundreds of projects the children have undertaken that they are highly motivated when they are working on their own ideas.

‘In the words of Malaguzzi, “Once children are helped to perceive themselves as authors and inventors, once they are helped to discover the pleasures of inquiry, their motivation and interest explode.”’

© MA Education 2022. Published by MA Education Limited, St Jude's Church, Dulwich Road, Herne Hill, London SE24 0PB, a company registered in England and Wales no. 04002826. MA Education is part of the Mark Allen Group. – All Rights Reserved