Introducing Malaguzzi

Exploring the life and work of Reggio Emilia's founding father

Sandra Smidt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136280160
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Loris Malaguzzi is recognised as the founder of the extraordinary programmes of preschool education that developed after the war in Reggio Emilia, Italy. Deeply embedded in the cultures and communities they serve, these unique preschools have justifiably become famous throughout the world.

In this accessible and engaging text, Sandra Smidt examines how Malaguzzi's philosophy developed out of his personal experiences of growing up in post-fascist Italy. His ideas are explored and illustrated throughout by examples relating to everyday early years practice. The key themes explored include:

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• relationships — the importance of relationships, culture and contexts to learning within any setting and beyond;

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• transparency — the importance of listening and documentation to understanding and sharing learning;

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• questioning — inviting children to not only answer questions but raise them, allowing them to be equal partners in all learning situations;

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• creativity — finding ways of enabling children to use all the expressive languages they can find to express and share their ideas;

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• equity and fairness — involving the community in all decision-making and discussions, to ensure that early childhood education is accessible and relevant to all children.

This book will be of benefit to all those working with young children and essential reading for students on early childhood education programmes.

Chapter 1

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The life and times of Loris Malaguzzi

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World War II, or any war, in its tragic absurdity might have been the kind of experience that pushes a person towards the job of educating, as a way to start anew and live and work for the future. This desire strikes a person, as the war finally ends and the symbols of life reappear with violence equal to that of the time of destruction.… Right after the war I felt a pact, an alliance with children, adults, veterans from prison camps, partisans of the Resistance, and the sufferers of a devastated world.

(Malaguzzi in Edwards et al. 2011: 35)

We know that Loris Malaguzzi was born in Correggio, a small town and commune near Reggio Emilia in the province of Emilia Romagna, in the valley of the River Po. We know that he was born in 1920 and lived until 1994. We know that he married a woman named Nilde Bonaccini, who died in 1993. He died six weeks later at the age of only 74. We know that they had one son. Apart from that, we know almost nothing about his family, where they lived, what work they did, what their loves, passions, interests and fears were, or what they believed in and valued.

We do know that he grew up during the time of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist rule and that this was extremely significant to his thinking and development. He said that fascism had ‘gobbled up my youth’(Brunson 2001). With the encouragement of his father, he chose to become a teacher and enrolled in a teacher-training institute in 1939, from where he qualified as a primary teacher. After the war he enrolled in a course in Rome, studying psychology, at the National Centre for Research. This was, in fact, the first post-war course in psychology in Italy. After that he worked as a teacher in a state primary school for seven years. He was often described as being a polymath because of his wide range of interests, talents and abilities. These included being a sportsman, a theatre director, a maker of films and a journalist.

After his time in Rome he returned to Reggio Emilia, where he worked for the municipality (which you will remember is the equivalent of our local authorities) in a centre for children experiencing learning difficulties at school – a coincidental link with Vygotsky, who had also spent some of his too-short life working with children with special needs. In 1958 he became director of preschools in Reggio Emilia, where he spent the rest of his working life. He retired officially in 1985 but continued to dedicate all his energy to the system he had helped to create until his early death.

It seems strange that we know so little about his personal life, compared to what we know about the lives of Bruner and Vygotsky. What we do know something about is the culture and the context of his life, which we can usefully examine in order to understand and explain the effect they had on his thinking. In doing so we are adopting a socio-historical/cultural approach as we explore the history of Reggio Emilia and its inevitable impact on Loris Malaguzzi. You will appreciate that this is a vast area so, of necessity, this will be something of a potted history, but it will enable us to analyse just what it was that happened to Malaguzzi to have so profoundly affected his thinking, his philosophy, his questions and his answers.

You may feel tempted at this point to skip the rest of this chapter, thinking you want to know more about his ideas and less about history or politics. But I urge you to read what follows with attention because, without an understanding of this, you will not be able to really appreciate what makes Reggio Emilia so important and, for many people, so very elusive. To understand the preschool provision in Reggio Emilia you do have to understand the context.

A brief overview of the political history of Italy

The history of the small city of Reggio Emilia is that of many small cities in Europe, marked primarily by the physical devastation of intensive bombing, invasion, division, hatred, patriotism, guerrilla activity, subjugation and ultimate victory. The suffering of the people was so intense that there existed a state of almost civil war between the factions of those who had supported Mussolini and the fascists and those who had opposed him. It is difficult for people whose country has never been invaded to understand the depth of feeling that developed.

The defining event of the French Revolution in 1789 brought about massive changes in Europe. The development of industry, together with the move of people from the countryside to urban centres and the creation of a laissez-faire market economy, began to change many of the existing structures and groupings throughout much of Europe.

Fifty years later, in 1848, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto, proclaiming that the working class would rise, engage in class struggle, undo the gains of the bourgeoisie and control the means of production. The effect of this would be to end the marginalisation and alienation of groups of people, and bring about a fairer and more equitable society.

The political climate of Italy grew out of the parallel development of two opposing and powerful ideologies, socialism/communism (based on the ideas of Marx and Engels) and fascism. In 1892 the Italian Socialist Party (Partita Socialista d’Italia PSI) was founded in Genoa. Italy had been on the winning side of the 1914–18 world war, although that victory was painfully earned. It was tinged with resentment when Italy appeared to make fewer gains than the other winning countries; one of the things that most angered the people was the awarding of the town of Fiume to then-called Yugoslavia and, after an abortive attempt to take back Fiume, Italians talked angrily of their ‘mutilated victory’. In the succeeding years there were some political changes moving from a system dominated by small cliques to a fully fledged parliamentary democracy. In the 1919 elections the dominant parties were the Socialists and the Catholic People’s Party. The Socialists were optimistic but the party subsequently (and disastrously as it turned out) split into two factions – the Trades Union faction led by Filippo Tulati and the International Socialist faction led by the young Benito Mussolini.

The PSI was initially opposed to Italy becoming involved in the war, which led to Mussolini leaving the party and later, disenchanted by the state of post-war Italy, to form his own, the Fascist Party.

It is important to understand what it was that the opposing political groups stood for:

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Fascism was and still is an extreme right-wing party, glorifying one race or nation above all others. It is, by definition and history, opposed to communism or liberalism and hence hostile towards all those struggling to free themselves from oppression. These include women, workers, immigrants, the poor, the voiceless, the vote-less and children. It is important to learn and to remember that the Catholic Church in Italy supported Mussolini, his party and his policies, and this, as we will see, became very significant to how Malaguzzi’s thinking developed.

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The communists/socialists in Italy have had a checkered and difficult history, with the formation of factions within and then smaller groupings within those very factions, opposition from without and lack of effective leadership. Traditionally their interest has been in liberating those who are voiceless and oppressed by considering the provision of education, work and opportunities for all. For all their difficulties they have had some serious and important leaders.

One of the most interesting of these was Antonio Gramsci. He became a leading thinker on many things, including education and schooling. He was a Marxist and a journalist, who was incarcerated by the fascists and spent the last 11 years of his life in one of Mussolini’s prisons. During this time he smuggled out his now-famous notebooks/diaries, which have since been published and become extremely powerful and influential documents. Although the diaries were published promptly in Italy, they only appeared in English translation in the 1970s. He had been born in a small town on the island of Sardinia in 1891 and was one of seven children. His was one of the few literate families on the island; he excelled at school and won a scholarship to the University of Torino, a city in the north of Italy, sometimes called ‘the red capital of Italy’. By the end of the First World War Torino’s population was made up of 30 per cent industrial workers, excluding the 10 per cent who were in the army. The workers of Torino had a very combative history and it was in this world, this atmosphere and culture, that Gramsci started his university life. He was already a socialist and, over time, began to consider the importance of the struggle against bourgeois (or what we might call middle class) values. For him, this struggle for equality was an ideological and cultural one. One of his key ideas is that of hegemony, which is how the whole of any society is permeated by a system of values, beliefs, attitudes and morals that has the effect of supporting and maintaining the status quo in power relations. So, for example, in Italy during the fascist years, the values of the Catholic Church, upholding the values of the fascists, ensured that little or nothing changed. In essence, hegemony is inseparable from power. When you start to consider Malaguzzi’s values and principles you will begin to have more of an understanding of what is meant by hegemony.

The communists and socialists, with their commitment to social change designed to rectify the existing unfairness, wanted better provision for the children of the poor, for women and girls, for children largely unseen. In doing this they began to think about and later to debate a number of issues. These included the following:

•	The question of whether educators should have particular specialist training and what this should consist of and how it should be delivered.
•	What children should learn and where and how.
•	How to build an education around not just knowing what others have said, thought and done, but essentially about questioning what has been said, thought and done. This became a key theme in Malaguzzi’s thinking, as you will see.

The politics of Reggio Emilia

Reggio Emilia itself is a small and beautiful town. It has fine architecture, paved streets, historic buildings, squares and open spaces, a tiny theatre and what is called the best preschool provision for young children in the world. It was where the Italian flag, the tricolour, was first unveiled. It is set in the rich agricultural and industrial region of Emilia Romagna – an area sometimes called Italy’s ‘red belt’ or zona rosa, because it was here that the majority of the people, poor and exploited, joined the socialist and communist parties that later led the resistance to the German Occupation during the Second World War.

The region suffered terribly during this war. There was fierce fighting, vicious reprisals and great suffering and injustice, which touched and coloured the lives of all. An analysis of the period suggests that the growth and strength of the resistance during the war continued beyond it to create social, political, institutional and cultural breaks with the past. The region had for generations been dominated by a civil and class war between the landlords and wealthy (who had often been supporters of fascism) and the labourers, farmhands and the poor.

After the war, trades unions developed and gained more power, and the vital role the communists had played in ensuring liberation allowed them to begin winning electoral victories in the first local elections, then to build links with other social actors and, in some cases, with the Anglo-Americans, who had come into the region with the express purpose of supervising the building of what they called ‘democracy’ in Italy. It is clear that the devastation of war had caused the infrastructure to be badly damaged, unemployment was high, food was rationed and there was a growing black market. Agriculture, the most important sector of the economy, was marked by backwardness and the effects of low consumption. The people had little to live on.

The period between the end of the war and 1955 is sometimes described as a ‘phase of learning’. What is meant by this is that it was seen as the time when the communists learned by doing. Their aim was to achieve social change and, in seeking this, they were both pragmatic and ideological. In short, they did things that they could do practically, politically and economically, but also things that they believed to be right or just. They set about trying to improve the living conditions of the working class, modifying the economic structures and the social dynamics, as well as, surprisingly, intensifying their support of capitalist development.

For Malaguzzi, there were lessons to be learned from what was happening in his community to its inhabitants. He was party to the things the communists were trying and able to do, and ideologically his heart was with their goals and ambitions. He learned that he, too, could learn from the things he began to do. This meant that he felt able to start trying to change things before he had been specifically trained to do so. He also learned that, in order to achieve his goals, he, like the communists, needed to be both pragmatic and ideological. These are difficult and sometimes contradictory ideas but, as we trace what Malaguzzi did, you will be able to assess just how pragmatic and idealistic he would remain.

So we know that Malaguzzi’s childhood and early adulthood were spent under the shadow of fascism, and that he was alive to see the effects of both fascism and war on the people around him. He directly experienced the hunger, the poverty, the damage to the infrastructure of his communities, the rations, the attacks on learning and thinking and reading and questioning. His experiences allowed him to become critical of the dominance of the church in early education and gave him an awareness of the vital and varied roles played by trades unionists, peasants, workers, factory owners, officials, women, mothers, educators, politicians and others.

The history of early childhood education in Reggio Emilia up to 1945

Having looked briefly at the history of Italy, particularly at the growth of both communism and fascism, and its impact on the life and thoughts of Malaguzzi, we now narrow the focus to look at the early development of provision for young children in the region up to the end of the Second World War, around when Malaguzzi emerged as a trained teacher.

Interest in national provision for the care and education of young children has a long history. During the decade of Italy’s unification in the nineteenth century, the president of the national association of Asili Rurali per L’infanzia (rural care for young children) went to ask the king to support the development of some preschool provision. In addition, the Catholic Church sponsored out-of-home care for disadvantaged preschool children in the form of charitable social service and religious training for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For most Italians, however, and for much of the twentieth century, a collaborative model of home-based child care had been the norm and the ideal. Responsibility for the care of the young child, particularly of infants and toddlers, was considered a family responsibility, involving both nuclear and extended family members, generally women.

At the beginning of the twentieth century there were some significant developments in thinking about early childhood education in Italy in general. In the more industrialised regions, some communities and private entrepreneurs began to experiment with organised child care for children before they reached school age.

In 1907, Maria Montessori set up the first Casa dei Bambini (Children’s House) in the slums of San Lorenzo in Rome. There she experimented with the methods and equipment she had developed with and for children with disabilities. Observation, individualism and auto-education were the watchwords of her approach. In 1912, an English edition of her book, The Montessori Method, was published, making her internationally famous. She created a second Casa dei Bambini in Milan and, not long afterwards, mothers in that city began to demand provision for preschool children to enable them to go to work. In 1924 she made the mistake, in my view, of accepting government support for her methods. Ten years later she refused to concede further to Mussolini’s demands and he insisted that all Montessori schools throughout the country be closed. The same fate befell the schools she set up in Germany when Hitler came to power. It is interesting that a process of looking at and listening to the children, seeing them as individuals and focusing on how they could take control of their own learning was so threatening. Think about this as you carry on reading.

Also influential in their way were the two sisters, Rosa and Caroline Agazzi, who developed some new ideas about how to teach children and train teachers. They were interested in how young children used what they called their ‘natural abilities’ to express themselves when they were in situations closely resembling the home. You might wonder if there is any such thing as ‘the home’ and whether some homes were, and sometimes still are, regarded as superior to others. You might also wonder if their ideas on education had anything to do with learning.

Looking more closely and regionally at Reggio Emilia, we know that the area had suffered tremendous losses during the First World War and its economy lay in ruins afterwards. Thousands were without work, and it was during this phase that Benito Mussolini (originally a member of the communist party) became disillusioned with the communists and set up his rival fascist party. In 1922 the king asked him to form a government, which he did and where he remained until he ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: context and culture
• 1 The life and times of Loris Malaguzzi
• 2 What makes Reggio Emilia so special?
• 3 The importance of relationships
• 4 The importance of listening and documentation
• 5 The hundred languages of children
• 6 The hundred languages of teachers
• 7 The story of the theatre curtain
• 8 Responding to the needs of babies and toddlers
• 9 Democracy and participation in early childhood education
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index