What the report covers

The report is a history-and-concepts brief on the Reggio Emilia approach. It starts with the municipal schools that grew in Reggio Emilia after World War II, then explains the image of the child, the environment as a third teacher, project work, and documentation.

Only after those ideas are clear does it ask what Dewey, Piaget, and Vygotsky contributed to the language teachers use, and what they did not invent.

A short history

The approach is tied to a place and a civic project, not to a packaged kit. Parents and educators in Reggio Emilia, in the years after the war, built schools that treated early education as a public good. Loris Malaguzzi became the best-known pedagogical voice. The municipal infant-toddler centers and preschools, and later the work of Reggio Children, are the institutional line students should cite, rather than a generic "Italian method."

Core ideas

The child is viewed as a bearer of rights and of many ways of expressing thought, often summed up as the "hundred languages." The classroom environment is planned as carefully as an adult colleague: light, materials, and traces of previous work are meant to invite the next question. Teachers work in pairs, and pedagogistas support the group. Documentation (photographs, transcripts, panels) makes the child's thinking visible to the child, the family, and the staff.

Projects emerge from children's questions and can run for weeks. That is why searches for "Reggio Emilia approach vs Montessori" are common: both prepare an environment, but Reggio documentation and emergent projects are a different daily rhythm from a set sequence of materials.

Dewey, Piaget, and Vygotsky

Dewey's Experience and Education(1938) supports the idea that worthwhile learning grows from experience that is social and reflective, not from a disconnected activity. Piaget supports the claim that children construct knowledge through action, which is why materials are real and time is unhurried. Vygotsky supports the claim that meaning is made with others, which is why talk, drawing, and joint work are treated as thinking, not as decoration.

The report is careful not to say that Reggio "is" Piaget or "is" Vygotsky. Malaguzzi and the municipal staff built a local practice. The three names are sources they and later commentators used, not a franchise agreement.

Sources

1. Edwards, C., Gandini, L., & Forman, G. (Eds.). (2012). The hundred languages of children(3rd ed.). Praeger.
2. Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. Macmillan.
3. Piaget, J. (1952). The origins of intelligence in children.
4. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society. Harvard University Press.
5. Reggio Children. Documentation of the municipal infant-toddler centers and preschools of Reggio Emilia.

Last updated: November 13, 2026