Reggio Emilia Approach Explained

Children as capable investigators, the environment as a third teacher, and documentation instead of testing. What the approach asks of adults, which is a great deal.

Where it comes from

Reggio Emilia, a town in northern Italy, after the Second World War. Parents and the educator Loris Malaguzzi built early years provision from almost nothing, deliberately founded on a view of children as competent rather than needy.

It is worth knowing that it is not a method and does not licence itself. It is a philosophy, developed in a particular place, that other settings interpret.

The central ideas

The image of the child. The foundational commitment: children are capable, curious, full of potential, and are researchers rather than empty vessels. Everything else follows from taking this seriously.

The hundred languages. Children express and think through many media: drawing, clay, movement, light, construction, music, speech. Restricting them to speech and writing removes ways of thinking, not just of expressing.

The environment as a third teacher. Space is designed with great care: natural light, mirrors, transparent materials, plants, real objects, and an atelier or studio with proper art materials.

Emergent, project-based work. Long investigations arising from children's own questions. A project may run for months and the adults do not know where it will go.

Documentation. Instead of assessment: photographs, transcripts of what children said, their drawings, displayed and revisited. Documentation makes thinking visible and is used to plan what comes next.

The atelierista. An artist working alongside teachers.

What it asks of adults

More than most approaches, and this is the honest difficulty.

Adults must observe closely, record carefully, resist supplying answers, follow a project they did not plan, and tolerate not knowing where it is going. That requires time, skill and a genuine belief that the children's direction is worth following.

Done without those, it becomes attractive rooms and nice displays.

The evidence position

Thin, and for a structural reason: the approach resists standardised measurement on principle, so there is little comparative outcome research. Its influence on early years practice internationally is large; its evidence base in the conventional sense is small.

That is worth stating plainly rather than implying a research backing that does not exist.

What a family can take

Treat children's questions as worth pursuing properly rather than answering briefly. Provide real materials rather than toy versions. Keep a project going over weeks. Record what they said and show it to them later, which children find fascinating. And ask what they think before telling them anything.

The transferable core is the image of the child. Most of the practice follows from actually believing it.