by A few years ago, I turned my friend Will Richardson onto Seymour Sarason‘s great book, And What Do YOU Mean About Learning? Ever since, Will has been asking people to define learning.
Earlier this week, I had a meeting in Reggio Emilia, Italy where I picked up a pamphlet explaining their awe-inspiring approach to early childhood education. It looks like the sort of document you might see scattered at the DMV or local health clinic, but its contents are profound.
Here is how the infant-toddler centers and preschools of the Municipality of Reggio Emilia define learning:
“Learning as a process of individual and group construction
Each child, like each human being, is an active constructor of knowledge, competencies, and autonomies, by means of original learning processes that take shape with methods and times that are unique and subjective in the relationship with peers, adults and the environment.
The learning process is fostered by strategies of research, comparison of ideas, and co-participation; it makes use of creativity, uncertainty, intuition, curiosity; it is generated in play and in the aesthetic, emotional relational, and spiritual dimensions, which it interweaves and nurtures; it is based on the centrality of motivation and the pleasure of learning.”
Infant-toddler Centers and Preschools Isituzione of the Municipality of Reggio Emilia. (2011). Indications – Preschools and Infant-Toddler Centres of the Municipality of Reggio Emilia. page 11.
Interested in learning more about the Reggio Emilia Approach to education?
- Attend Constructing Modern Knowledge 2012
- Explore these books and/or videos
Veteran educator Gary Stager, Ph.D. is the author of Twenty Things to Do with a Computer – Forward 50, co-author of Invent To Learn — Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom, publisher at Constructing Modern Knowledge Press, and the founder of the Constructing Modern Knowledge summer institute. He led professional development in the world’s first 1:1 laptop schools thirty years ago and designed one of the oldest online graduate school programs. Gary is also the curator of The Seymour Papert archives at DailyPapert.com. Learn more about Gary here.
