ABSTRACT
The Italian city of Reggio Emilia is known worldwide for its municipal early childhood services. Millions of early childhood educators have been inspired to explore the role of the environment, new interpretations of teachers as researchers, and the potentials of documentation, children’s symbolic languages and long-term progettazione in children’s early learning. Less often appreciated yet foundational to the “Reggio Emilia Approach” are the city’s central roles in La Resistenza and the Italian women’s movement and ensuing interpretations of family-school-community relations as essential to a democratic society. This chapter draws on several decades of study in Italy, including collaborative inquiry with Reggio Emilian colleagues, to describe that city’s interpretation of an education for democracy as instantiated in their municipal early childhood services. The conceptual framework of cultural models and scholarship from the field of psychological anthropology supports this analysis of Reggio Emilia’s radical place in Italy’s complex political history, its long-standing cooperative traditions, and the courage of a small group of poor farmers as sources of inspiration and sustainability for their municipal servizi dell’infanzia and advocacy on behalf of an increasingly diverse population of immigrants and refugees. The chapter concludes by highlighting Reggio Emilia’s conceptualization of democracy as dynamic, deliberative, negotiated and evolving.
