Well, Why Not?

This week I attended the NAREA summer conference in Chicago--NAREA being the North American Reggio Emilia Alliance. When I first started learning about this teaching method, I was totally overwhelmed by the architectural and design elements I saw in Reggio-inspired schools. Honestly, a sleeping loft that's connected to the classroom by a giant slide? That's straight-up fun.

IKEA enjoys quite a bit of business from Reggio-inspired schools in this country, and my experience with the method so far has been in affluent communities. Money does have to be spent, because as a general rule you want to offer the children high-quality stuff (since you view them as high-quality individuals). It's easy for high-quality materials to be conflated with high-quality curriculum--but they are different animals.

The conference included school visits around the city. Let me be clear that these are not fancy neighborhoods. In fact we were discouraged by our guides from taking public transportation home. These schools are Head Starts, subsidized, or public schools, and they are awesome.

In one school (70% native Spanish speakers), children and parents were photographed together and asked, "Why do you speak Spanish?" The photograph and answers (in Spanish and English) are mounted and displayed along the hallway for the year. Imagine how this makes families feel! Particularly those who speak only Spanish and are typically invisible to institutions like public schools. Suddenly they are visible, their words are visible, and in their own language. There's no question that this school is a place specifically for them and their children.

Another school had documented an ongoing learning project about hair. The kids in the class were obsessed with each others hair, so the teachers brought in curlers, straighteners, brushes, ribbons, barrettes, etc. Boys and girls were equally involved--and when you see these girls' hairdos, you can see why. Boys might not get adorned with barrettes in the same way, but they sure watch the women and girls in their lives who do. The teachers had tapped into a major cultural element for these kids, and there are deep social skills to be learned through this relatively simple setup.

On the last morning of the conference, Vanessa Rich delivered the opening remarks. She is the Deputy Commissioner of Family Support Services for the city of Chicago, meaning she is The Woman when it comes to subsidized childcare. She started out by saying that when she first heard of the Reggio method in America, she thought it was for "rich white kids." So did I!

I would like to know more about the transition these schools went through to start using emergent curriculum. I think there must have been some big bureaucratic hurdles. Somebody decided these kids were worth it.

Well, why not?

http://www.chicagocommons.org/