Our approach
The Hundred Languages
The work on this site — the writing, the curation, the small bilingual books I make — is inspired by the Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education.
Reggio Emilia is the Italian town where, in 1945, the educator Loris Malaguzzi began work that would become one of the most influential approaches to early childhood in the world. At its heart is a single radical idea: that children are the protagonists of their own learning. Not consumers of curriculum. Not vessels to be filled. Agents with preferences, theories, and strategies of their own.
The most famous Reggio concept is the hundred languages of the child — the idea that children have many modes of expression beyond speech: the language of gesture, the language of clay, the language of repetition, the language of music, the language of being heard.
For families raising children in more than one literal language, this idea has a quietly powerful extra layer. The hundred languages now include the actual languages we speak at home: Italian and English; German and English; Italian, German, and English. Each is doing real work. Each lives in a context — the bedtime song, the grandmother's voice on the phone, the picture book that has been read a hundred times.
What I make here is an attempt to apply that frame to early bilingual childhood. The books, the resources, the writing — all of them are invitations toward the materials of language, rather than instructions about how to acquire it. Children are not to be administered to; they are to be welcomed in.
If that resonates, you'll find more across the site. The longer essay on this — Reggio Emilia, the hundred languages of the child, and what it means for bilingual families — is on the blog.
— Paola
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