Digital Educational Toolbox

To support the infant-toddler centers and preschools in Reggio Emilia during the pandemic, NAREA purchased 250 digital toolboxes for resale to the Reggio-inspired community of North America. As part of NAREA’s efforts to invest in and learn with educators in North America, we encourage you and your colleagues to consider purchasing a digital toolbox for an educator or educators in your local community as part of our collective awareness to take more actions on behalf of equity, inclusion, and diversity.

The contents of the digital toolbox are a useful addition to personal and school libraries. The toolbox is indispensable for professional development, parent participation, and community work. Won’t you please join us in a collective effort to respond to the pandemic’s impact in Reggio Emilia and among our own colleagues in communities of color, of poverty, and of struggle?

Vea Vecchi states:

“Making connections and ties between things that seem to be very distant from each other really means revolutionizing the current usual thinking, which is used to thinking in categories and which too often deals with problems by separating them and trying to resolve them in a separate way. We separate children from adults, the elderly from the young when instead we are all together in life’s problems. In this pandemic, very often we have contrasted health against economy and everywhere in education we separate theory from practice. It could be a very long list: however, in the last century we see the rise of several disciplines where different areas of knowledge collaborate together. For example . . . .”

Find out more about the theory of the 100 languages, with the words of Loris Malaguzzi, a theoretical contribution by Vea Vecchi, and experiences in Reggio Emilia’s municipal infant-toddler centers and preschools. Thanks to this course of four videos and two ebooks, teachers, educators, pedagogistas, atelieristas, parents, and people curious about children’s learning can encounter a flexible “container” of ideas and concepts that can be re-combined and innovated in relation to the focus of each learning journey.

The reading and viewing of the content of this professional learning toolbox can follow entirely personal and subjective directions, but the order we advise might ease the process of understanding and the pleasure of enjoyment.

• Video 1, The Superpower of the 100 Languages, Vea Vecchi introduces the theory of the 100 languages and takes time to consider related conceptual and knowledge nodes.

• Video 2, The Many Faces of the Assembly and the accompanying e-book both document a project of the same name with children in preschool.

• Video 3, The Many Faces of the Assembly + Diego, Rayan, and Francesca, is dedicated to the relations between mark-making, drawing, and clay.

• Video 4, An Atelier for a Plurality of Languages reveals what happens backstage in the preparation of an atelier context in a school.

• Loris Malaguzzi’s words in Fragments, the first in a digital series dedicated to him, give us a framework of theory and meaning in which all the contents of the toolbox can be positioned.