The 10th NAREA Winter Conference

Ensuring All Children’s Rights to Education Based in Relationships and the Hundred Languages

The board and staff of the North American Reggio Emilia Alliance welcomes you to Madison, Wisconsin, and our 10^th winter conference: Ensuring All Children’s Rights to Education Based in Relationships and the Hundred Languages. Since 2008, Reggio Children and NAREA have collaborated to support the presence of the exhibit and related professional development in 23 cities across North America, which brought together more than 160,000 educators, advocates, and community organizers.

Our story has connections to earlier histories of dialogue and devotion. Madison has a deep history of appreciation, care, and dedication to design and the arts. The community continues in that vein as it hosts The Wonder of Learning-The Hundred Languages of Children exhibit and professional development focused on the hundred languages. Madison benefits from collaboration between Preschool of the Arts, Madison Central Library and Overture Center of the Arts, organizations working to bring about an optimistic future for children and adults.

It is with special gratitude that we welcome our colleagues, Marina Castagnetti and Nunzia Franzese, as well as interpreter, Jane McCall, from Reggio Emilia, Italy. It is through their sharing and exchange that we will develop robust interpretations of the values, philosophies, and experiences of the municipal infant-toddler centers and schools of childhood in Reggio Emilia.

Through our professional development projects, we encounter a host of schools at varying points of their own journey, willing to open their doors, expose their work, and welcome the participation of visitors. This style of development has been introduced to all of us by the only “Reggio schools” of Reggio Emilia, Italy. To be continually encouraged to find our own unique identities as schools, in different communities worthy in our own identity, is to see how much the message of Reggio Emilia is based on attitudes of research and innovation, rather than prescriptive dogma. For this, we are also grateful.

We wish to highlight our belief in and commitment to the value of embracing a shared vision for education, which cultivates the potential of all children and adults. Recognizing the ever-increasing number of schools for young children inspired by Reggio’s approach to life and education, we honor and encourage each school and every group of colleagues to invest in an ongoing approach that includes permanent study, research, collaboration, innovation, transparency, and exchange.

Please enjoy the pleasure of thinking and wondering as we work together to construct a better future for our children, our families, our communities, and ourselves.

March 21–24, 2019 | Madison, Wisconsin