Seeking a language renaissance: report from Reggio Emilia, Italy

Comment: This is an excellent piece from the Arctic. It’s worth reading and realizing a good program does embody the Reggio ideas, at the same time remembering that it’s not a new idea and it is a very natural idea. In a very natural home, a parent would come to these ideas simply because they accommodate the family so well. School should be as much family as possible with very young children.

March 20, 2008

DEBBY EDWARDSEN

For The Arctic Sounder

According to recent surveys, fewer than 10 percent of North Slope homes are I’f1upiaq speaking.

The majority of those fluent in the language are now over the age of 40. Most of those who have dedicated their lives to teaching I’f1upiaq are nearing the age of retirement or have already retired.

For those who care, and we are many, the question becomes: Whose responsibility is it to insure the survival of the endangered I’f1upiaq language?

There have been many answers to this question over the years, but the overriding answer is clear: If our grandchildren and great-grandchildren are to continue to hear the language spoken – and speak it themselves – we all have a role to play.

During the 2008 budget process, the North Slope Borough School District’s Board of Education decided to turn its early childhood program into a language immersion program.

This program is neither federally mandated nor state funded so we know this choice is ours to make.

We also know that early childhood education is crucial to the academic success of our children, so we are not simply looking to teach language, we want to offer the best program we can using the language and culture as the medium of instruction.

Recently, the board traveled to Reggio Emilia in Italy with four school board members, three administrators and an immersion teacher to look at an early childhood program that has attracted a great deal of international attention.

We went, hoping to find a method for saving a language. What we found promises to encompass that goal and more.

Our trip included visits to a number of schools as well as scholarly lectures on the philosophy behind them. We were joined with educators from more than a dozen other countries.

“History can be changed by beginning with children,” wrote Loris Malaguchhi, one of the founders of the Reggio Emilia schools.

The history of these schools began in 1945, in the wake of World War II, in a little village in Italy, where a group of people decided to build a school using the bricks of the buildings bombed during the war.

They washed each brick by hand, funding the project through the sale of an abandoned tank.

It was an act of hope in the wake of a war which in Italy saw the overthrow of fascism. Out of it grew a new kind of school with a new kind of hope for a democratic future.

According to the educators of Reggio Emilia, there are two basic concepts of school –school is either a place where rights are realized or as a place where needs are met.

Meeting needs is a negative, deficit-based model, whereas recognizing rights is empowering.

The rights recognized by the schools of Reggio Emilia include: the right to be an active participant in one’s own life experience, the right to be recognized by others for one’s knowledge, the right to develop all of one’s potential, the right to be different and the right to be welcomed and valued by the community.

School is viewed as a system of relationships. Parents, teachers and children are each recognized as bringing their own knowledge into the mix.

The Reggio Emilia schools educate children from birth to age 6, in the belief that by the age of 6 the child has built the intellectual framework he or she will use for the rest of their life.

How creative and how adaptable that framework is becomes of critical importance.

People talk of the wonder of the child, but how often do they actually allow that sense of wonder to blossom and bear fruit in the child’s learning process?

The educators of Reggio Emilia reminded us that early childhood is a time of intense intellectual growth and creativity. They also made us realize that often we organize our schools in such a way as to discourage rather than encourage wonder-based learning.

Our visits to the schools of Reggio Emilia allowed us to watch their ideas in practice.

The schools were bright and colorful child-centered places. They weren’t packed full of plastic toys; they were rich in real things for the children to learn from.

In one room, I watched a group of small children sitting around a display of local plants. They were drawing pictures of these, each from their own perspective, and discussing them among themselves, with a teacher offering occasional comments and questions.

“When the children formulate a scientific point of view we never correct them, we express solidarity with them and help them formulate and test their own theories – we are very careful not to say something is wrong. Very often the children are right and we don’t even realize it,” a teacher at Reggio Emilia said.

The teachers and children of these schools were engaged in a joint process of learning and researching with the understanding that knowledge is not the fruit of education, it is an ongoing process.

What the teachers try to do is to document and fully understand the “culture of childhood,” to let children develop their full capacity to process information and organize their understanding of the world as children.

The quality of education, they say, depends strongly on the relationship the system has with its local community, because successful educational systems support and are supported by the cultures they live in.

A school is made of meanings and values not walls and bricks and education is ultimately a social act. It does not take place in a cultural vacuum, it takes place within the context of a specific culture, they stressed.

This is something we, in this country, tend to forget under the No Child Left Behind, one-size-fits all mentality of education.

We tend to forget how important it is for the educational system to become firmly rooted in the culture it lives in.

Reggio Emilia schools teach through project-based learning, not teaching units, and the projects are often community-based.

This approach started with the very first school, where once a week teachers would pack the children into a truck and take them into the town to study some aspect of the community and its culture.

“We feel it is very important for our schools to be connected to the communities they are a part of – this connection is often the genesis for a project,” a teacher said.

The most hopeful thing for many of us in the school board was how well this system fits with traditional I’f1upiaq learning styles.

The schools of Reggio Emilia encourage the same kind of creativity that allowed the I’f1upiaq to survive in the Arctic over the millennia.

They do this through a teaching style NSBSD Bilingual/Multicultural Program Coordinator Jana Harcharek characterized as “organized pakaking.”

Our goal, now, will be to use what we have learned in Italy to fashion a new vision of early childhood education.

We hope to expand the program, through partnership, to include younger children.

We want, ultimately, to develop it into a language nest, a place that will bring all generations together for a language renaissance.

We cannot do this overnight and we cannot do it without active community involvement.

We hope that, like those Italians who built a school from the rubble of war, our people will be willing to roll up their sleeves and help us.

We hope, too, that like the educators of Reggio Emilia, we will someday be able to say that our community was willing to participate and volunteer their time in the school because they understand that they work for the future and they feel a sense of wonder at what they are doing – in the same way the children feel a sense of wonder as they are learning.

Debby Edwardsen is the president of the North Slope Borough School district Board of Education.