What it Takes to Embrace the Reggio Emilia Approach (and other liberatory approaches)
I talk to myself. If you see me biking to work in Brooklyn, it is not unlikely I'm blabbering to myself. It's a way I make sense of my thoughts and my world.
When I learned about Internal Internal Family Systems, I talked to myself even more. The gist of IFS is that we are all made up of parts. Perhaps the critic, the compassionate person, the logical part, the emotional part. Key to IFS is that all parts can be helpful. A practice in IFS is to invite your parts to talk to you. What is your critic saying? What is your inner protector saying? Then, there's your self which is the leader of these parts, which ultimately can make a decision.
The self is kind of like the team leader who listens to everyone, but ultimately must make its own decision. Before parts work, I gave leadership to whichever part of me was loudest (the anxious protective part of me). Now, while I listen to the anxious protective part of me, I also listen to the long term planner, the possibility maker, and whomever else shows up. I then decide, based on that conversation, how to move forward. This process of listening to my parts and then making a decision is what I mean when I mention parts work.
Developing Agency
In deciding to move forward after listening to my inner dialogue, I develop my agency, or my ability to make decisions. This ability to make decision in the face of ambiguity (I can't predict my day or how I'll feel) helps me develop the disposition of embracing ambiguity (A term I first heard in Navigating Ambiguity by Andrea Small & Kelly Schmutte). The ability to embrace ambiguity allows for me to embrace emergent pedagogies that don't try to control others but, rather, aim to find a sense of homeostasis or balance in community. I go from being afraid of what may come to being confident I can handle it.
What does this have to do with Reggio?
The Reggio Emilia approach can be difficult to understand because it can be done in so many ways. It can be done in a variety of ways because action comes from principles, not from a preset map. We make the map as we go -we wayfind. We use ambiguity as a resource of possibilities rather than something to be afraid of. It is this wayfinding of possibilities that makes Reggio so powerful and also so terrifying. To balance wayfinding and exploration we must also cultivate the ability to decide - another scary decision for so many of us.
So yes - Reggio is difficult to implement because we must not only embrace the unknown but we must make decisions. Now, try supporting more than a couple people to do this in community and perhaps you can see how this approach can be challenging to take hold. It is especially a challenge in the context of the United States, where education reform has often focused on getting "results" that are easily measurable - in other words, results that are easy to control and understand. But, if you have lived for any amount of time, you know the world does not work that way.
Yet, as a society, we insist. And we go along with it because it feels safe, it feels like there's a sense of control. But control is an illusion.
Being with what is out of our control is the practice of being with complexity, or that which is unpredictable yet cohesive. It's possible, but it requires cultural in addition to systemic shifts.
I believe that the more those of us aiming to shift culture into embracing this ambiguity, rooted in humanity and community, find each other, then the more likely liberatory approaches such as the Reggio Emilia Approach can take hold and lead to development of our own thinking and practice.
What is your relationship with the parts of yourself and how has it made it or not made it into your work in education?
P.S. I started a YouTube Channel - Embracing Emergence in Education, in an effort to cultivate a node in this wider community.
