The Reggio Emilia Approach: The Hundred Languages of Children in the Research Literature

The Reggio Emilia approach grew out of a preschool that parents in war-ruined northern Italy built with their own hands in 1945, and matured, under the leadership of Loris Malaguzzi, into a municipal system of infant-toddler centres and preschools that observers have ranked among the finest in the world. Its signature commitments — an image of the child as competent and rich in potential, an emergent curriculum organized around long-term projects, pedagogical documentation that makes learning visible, an atelier placing the arts at the center of inquiry, and the environment treated as a “third teacher” — have shaped early childhood practice far beyond Italy. This review traces the approach’s history and examines the research evidence bearing on each commitment. That evidence is encouraging but uneven: documentation and project-based learning enjoy supportive though largely qualitative or quasi-experimental findings; a major econometric evaluation associated with James Heckman finds meaningful long-run benefits relative to no formal care, but few differences relative to other good programs; and scholars have raised serious questions about how faithfully the approach travels. The review closes with practical implications for families and educators.

A school built from rubble: origins of the approach

Most pedagogies begin with a theorist. The Reggio Emilia approach began with parents. In the spring of 1945, in the days following Italy’s liberation, the people of Villa Cella, a small village outside the city of Reggio Emilia in the Emilia-Romagna region, resolved to build a school for young children themselves. According to the account preserved by Reggio Children, the municipality’s international organization, families raised the first funds by selling trucks and horses abandoned by the retreating German army and salvaged bricks from bombed-out buildings to raise the walls of what became the XXV Aprile preschool — a school the founders wanted to be, in the words of one participant, “new and different for our children” (Reggio Children, n.d.). The gesture contained the whole philosophy in embryo: education as a civic project, owned by families and community rather than delivered to them.

Loris Malaguzzi (1920–1994), then a young teacher from nearby Correggio, came to see the parent-built school and stayed, becoming the movement’s intellectual leader for the next half century (Moss, 2016). The grassroots schools became public institutions in 1963, when the Municipality of Reggio Emilia opened its first city-run preschool, with Malaguzzi as pedagogical collaborator; a municipal infant-toddler centre for children under three followed in 1971 (Reggio Children, n.d.). Under Malaguzzi’s coordination the schools developed the practices for which they are now known — the atelier, documentation, project work, and a formal role for parents in school governance. International recognition arrived through an exhibition of children’s work that began traveling internationally in 1981 and became known as The Hundred Languages of Children, and then, decisively, through the American press: a December 1991 Newsweek feature on the best schools in the world profiled the municipal system and its glass-walled Diana preschool, praising its commitment to innovation and quoting Malaguzzi’s conviction that a school must rest on the recognition that all children are different (Newsweek, 1991). A wave of international interest followed, particularly from North America. After Malaguzzi’s death in 1994 the municipality founded Reggio Children to manage pedagogical exchange, and the Loris Malaguzzi International Centre, a research and professional-development hub, opened in 2006 (Reggio Children, n.d.; Moss, 2016).

Two features distinguish Reggio Emilia’s diffusion from that of, say, Montessori education. First, the approach is municipal rather than proprietary: the original schools exist only in Reggio Emilia, and there is no certification, franchise, or accreditation for schools elsewhere, which therefore describe themselves as “Reggio-inspired.” Second, its founders have consistently resisted the idea that the approach is a method to be copied at all, insisting instead that it is a situated cultural project — a point with real consequences for how the research evidence should be read (New, 2007).

The image of the child and the hundred languages

The approach’s philosophical core is what Malaguzzi called the “image of the child.” In a 1993 seminar published the following year, he argued that every educator carries an internal image of childhood that silently directs how they speak to, listen to, and observe children, and that the Reggio schools chose deliberately an image of the child as rich in potential, strong, powerful, and competent — a holder of rights rather than merely of needs (Malaguzzi, 1994). From this follows the approach’s most famous metaphor: children possess “a hundred languages” — drawing, sculpture, dramatic play, music, movement, words, number — through which they express and construct understanding, and schooling too often honors only one or two of them (Edwards, Gandini, & Forman, 2012).

Theoretically, scholars locate the approach within the social-constructivist tradition of Piaget, Vygotsky, Dewey, and Bruner: knowledge is built by an active learner in relationship with others, and the teacher works as a partner, researcher, and provocateur rather than a transmitter (Hewett, 2001; New, 2007). Carlina Rinaldi, Malaguzzi’s successor as pedagogical director and later president of Reggio Children, added the influential concept of a “pedagogy of listening”: the adult’s first task is to listen — seriously, and with documentation in hand — to children’s theories about the world, because those theories are the raw material of curriculum (Rinaldi, 2006). It is worth saying plainly that these are philosophical commitments, not empirical findings; they cannot be “proven” by research. What research can do is test the practices that flow from them, and it is to those practices that we now turn.

Pedagogical documentation: making learning visible

Perhaps Reggio Emilia’s most concrete export is pedagogical documentation: the systematic recording of children’s words, work, and processes — through notes, transcripts, photographs, and displayed panels — not as decoration or record-keeping but as a tool for interpreting and extending learning. In the Reggio understanding, documentation makes children’s thinking visible to teachers (who use it to plan), to parents (who use it to participate), and to children themselves (who revisit their own ideas and see themselves as people whose thoughts matter) (Rinaldi, 2006).

The most substantial research treatment of documentation is Making Learning Visible, a multi-year collaboration between Harvard’s Project Zero and the municipal preschools of Reggio Emilia. Its researchers concluded that much of the most powerful learning in early childhood happens in groups, and that documenting how groups develop ideas and theories is not an accessory to that learning but part of the learning itself — a metacognitive engine for children and adults alike (Project Zero & Reggio Children, 2001). Independent empirical work, though still limited, points the same direction. Buldu (2010), in a study of six kindergarten classrooms in the United Arab Emirates involving 141 children, their teachers, and 67 parents, introduced Reggio-style documentation as a formative-assessment technique and found through observation and interviews that it supported children’s learning, sharpened teachers’ awareness of children’s thinking, and gave parents a markedly better understanding of what and how their children were learning. These are qualitative and small-to-moderate-scale findings rather than experimental effects, and the field still lacks randomized studies isolating documentation’s impact on child outcomes. But the mechanism documentation targets — formative assessment, the continuous use of evidence of learning to adjust teaching — is among the better-supported ideas in education research generally, and documentation is its most fully developed early childhood form.

Emergent curriculum and project work

Reggio classrooms are organized not around a fixed scope-and-sequence but around progettazione: flexible, often long-term projects that emerge from children’s questions and are shaped jointly by children and teachers. A project on shadows, a city’s birds, or an amusement park for sparrows may run for weeks, weaving through many of the hundred languages as children draw, build, debate, and revise their theories (Edwards et al., 2012; New, 2007).

How does project-based learning fare in the research literature? Reviews of studies conducted mostly with older students find a generally positive but methodologically qualified picture. Kokotsaki, Menzies, and Wiggins (2016), reviewing the project-based learning evidence, report that most studies use quasi-experimental designs without random assignment, so a causal link between project work and better outcomes “cannot be established with certainty”; the reviewed evidence nonetheless associates well-implemented project-based learning with gains in engagement and understanding, provided teachers receive support and projects are well structured. In early childhood specifically, the evidence base is thinner and dominated by small studies. Akar Gencer and Gönen (2015), for example, followed 18 six-year-olds in Turkey through three months of Reggio-inspired project work and found significant pre- to post-test gains on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking; without a control group, however, such gains cannot be confidently attributed to the program rather than to maturation or practice.

Stronger, if indirect, support comes from the large-scale British research on effective early-years pedagogy. The Researching Effective Pedagogy in the Early Years (REPEY) study, analyzing practice in settings identified as producing the best child outcomes in the linked longitudinal EPPE project, found that the most effective settings were characterized by episodes of “sustained shared thinking” — extended exchanges in which an adult and child work together intellectually to solve a problem, clarify a concept, or extend a narrative — occurring most readily in one-to-one and small-group interaction around activities that engage children’s own interests (Siraj-Blatchford, Sylva, Muttock, Gilden, & Bell, 2002). This is not a test of Reggio Emilia, but it is a rigorous description of exactly the kind of adult-child intellectual partnership that progettazione and the pedagogy of listening are designed to produce, and it stands as some of the best evidence that such partnership, rather than either free play alone or direct instruction alone, characterizes high-quality provision.

A caution belongs here as well. The broader claim that child-directed, play-rich programs are superior rests partly on a play literature whose causal foundations have been sharply examined. Lillard and colleagues (2013), reviewing the evidence on pretend play in Psychological Bulletin, concluded that many claimed benefits rest on correlational designs and unblinded experimenters, and that pretend play may be one route among several to healthy development rather than a uniquely causal one — while still endorsing playful, child-driven learning environments over didactic early instruction. Reggio Emilia, notably, has never claimed that free play alone educates; its emphasis on adult listening, provocation, and documentation makes it, in research terms, closer to the “guided play” and sustained-shared-thinking end of the spectrum where the evidence is most favorable.

The atelier: art as a language of inquiry

Every Reggio municipal preschool contains an atelier — a studio stocked with clay, wire, paint, light tables, and found materials — and employs an atelierista, an educator trained in the arts who works alongside classroom teachers. The fullest account of this institution comes from Vea Vecchi, atelierista at the Diana school for more than thirty years, whose book-length reflection describes the atelier not as art class but as a laboratory where aesthetic and cognitive work fuse: children drawing a bicycle are studying mechanics; children mixing greens are theorizing about light (Vecchi, 2010). Analyses of the approach consistently identify this integration of artistic expression with inquiry — rather than arts as enrichment appended to a curriculum — as one of the interlocking elements that make the system cohere (McNally & Slutsky, 2017).

Readers should distinguish between the claim that arts-saturated environments are good contexts for expression, observation, and fine-motor and symbolic development — which is consistent with the descriptive and qualitative literature — and the stronger claim that arts participation causes gains in unrelated academic domains, which the international evidence treats with skepticism. The honest summary is that the atelier is among the approach’s most admired and least experimentally tested elements: its value is documented richly in practice literature and hardly at all in controlled studies.

The environment as third teacher

Reggio educators famously describe the physical environment as the “third teacher,” alongside the classroom’s two co-teachers. Space in the municipal schools is designed to educate: a central piazza for encounter, transparency and mirrors that multiply perspectives, children’s work displayed at children’s eye level, natural light and living materials, and arrangements that invite small self-organized groups (Strong-Wilson & Ellis, 2007; Hewett, 2001). Strong-Wilson and Ellis (2007), reviewing the educational literature on space in early childhood, treat the Reggio environment as a deliberate source of “educational provocation” — the room itself posing questions — and trace how principles such as aesthetics, transparency, flexibility, and bringing the outdoors in have been taken up in classrooms and teacher education far beyond Italy. As with the atelier, the supporting research is largely conceptual and descriptive; environmental psychology offers convergent but general evidence that well-designed space affects young children’s behavior and interaction, not Reggio-specific effect sizes. Families should read “third teacher” as a design philosophy with strong face validity and wide professional endorsement rather than a quantified intervention.

Does it work? The evaluation evidence

For decades the central empirical question — do children who attend Reggio schools fare better in life? — went essentially unstudied, in part because the municipality itself resisted outcome testing as a distortion of its educational project (Rinaldi, 2006). That changed with the most ambitious evaluation to date, conducted by a team including Nobel laureate James Heckman. Biroli and colleagues (2018) assembled data on five age cohorts (roughly ages 6 to 50 in 2012) across the cities of Reggio Emilia, Parma, and Padova, comparing adults and children who had attended Reggio Emilia’s municipal infant-toddler centres and preschools with those who had attended religious or state alternatives or no formal program, using difference-in-differences and matching designs. The results were double-edged. Relative to receiving no formal early care, exposure to the Reggio municipal programs was associated with significantly better adult outcomes — higher employment and high school graduation, stronger socio-emotional skills, greater electoral participation, and lower obesity. Relative to other forms of preschool, however, the comparisons yielded no strong pattern of significant differences: the distinctive Reggio “treatment,” against the backdrop of Italy’s generally decent alternatives, was not demonstrably better than other organized programs.

Three things should be said about this finding. First, it is non-experimental: families were not randomly assigned, and although the authors’ methods address selection as well as observational data allow, causal certainty is unavailable. Second, the null result against alternatives partly reflects history’s compliment to Reggio Emilia: many Italian programs absorbed elements of its practice over the study period, shrinking the contrast being measured. Third, the finding that a high-quality municipal program beats no program at all, decades later and across multiple life domains, is itself consistent with the broader economics-of-early-childhood literature and is no small thing. Beyond this study, the outcome evidence consists mostly of small quasi-experimental and pre-post studies of Reggio-inspired programs abroad — such as the Turkish creativity study noted above — which trend positive but cannot bear much causal weight (Akar Gencer & Gönen, 2015). International expert assessment has been warmer than the trial evidence: the OECD’s Starting Strong programme selected Reggio Emilia as one of five exemplary curricular frameworks worldwide, presented by Rinaldi alongside High/Scope, Te Whāriki, Experiential Education, and the Swedish curriculum (OECD, 2004).

Critiques and open questions

The scholarly literature contains genuine criticism, and it deserves airing. The sharpest is Johnson’s (2000) provocation asking whether “Reggio Emilia,” as consumed abroad, really exists: drawing on Foucault and on the anthropology of cargo cults, he argued that the American embrace of Reggio functioned partly as uncritical worship of an imported icon — documentation panels and light tables adopted as talismans — without the political, cultural, and labor conditions (public funding, generous staffing, a city’s civic tradition) that make the original work. Sympathetic scholars concede the underlying point even while rejecting the polemic: New (2007) stresses that the approach is “cultural activity theory in practice,” inseparable from Emilia-Romagna’s traditions of collaboration, and Malaguzzi himself opposed the notion of an exportable method. For families evaluating a “Reggio-inspired” school, this is not an academic quibble: because no certification exists, the label ranges from deep engagement with the approach’s principles to a fondness for twigs and documentation displays, and the burden falls on parents to look for substance.

Other open questions are empirical. The approach’s resistance to standardized assessment, principled as it is, means the field lacks the comparative achievement data that exist for, say, Montessori or High/Scope. Its dependence on exceptional structural conditions — two co-teachers per classroom, an atelierista, paid planning and documentation time — raises unanswered questions about which elements survive dilution and which are load-bearing. And virtually all of the strongest evidence reviewed above concerns either the original Italian system or generic mechanisms (formative assessment, sustained shared thinking, guided play) rather than Reggio-inspired programs as actually implemented abroad. These gaps do not indict the approach; they mark where honest uncertainty lies.

Practical implications

Several implications follow for parents and educators. First, the practices most worth seeking in a Reggio-inspired program are the ones the evidence favors: sustained, genuinely two-way conversation between adults and children; project work that follows children’s questions but is actively extended by teachers; and documentation that is used — revisited with children and shared with families — rather than laminated and forgotten. A wall of beautiful panels that no one discusses is décor, not pedagogy. Second, parents should treat the “Reggio-inspired” label as the beginning of due diligence, not the end: ask how projects arise, how teachers decide what to document, and how parents participate in the school’s decisions — participation being the approach’s oldest and most distinctive commitment. Third, educators borrowing from Reggio should borrow the intellectual practices, not merely the aesthetics; the research on formative assessment and adult-child interaction suggests it is the listening, not the light table, that does the work. Fourth, families weighing philosophies should know that the best available evaluation finds high-quality programs of several kinds producing broadly similar outcomes; the choice between a good Reggio-inspired school and another good developmental program may legitimately turn on fit, values, and the particular classroom’s quality rather than on any decisive scientific verdict. Finally, the approach’s civic lesson — that early education flourishes as a shared community project — is one the research on parent engagement gives every reason to take seriously wherever a child is enrolled.

Eighty years after parents stacked salvaged bricks at Villa Cella, the Reggio Emilia approach occupies a distinctive position in the research literature: among the most admired, most imitated, and least experimentally tested of the great early childhood pedagogies. What the evidence supports is substantial — a municipal system whose long-run benefits relative to no preschool are measurable decades later, and a set of practices (documentation as formative assessment, project work as sustained shared thinking, arts as languages of inquiry) that align closely with what rigorous research identifies in high-quality settings everywhere. What remains unproven is any unique Reggio advantage over other excellent programs, and the approach’s own philosophy suggests its founders would have been untroubled by that verdict: they never claimed a method superior to all others, only an image of the child worth taking seriously. On that point, at least, the research and the philosophy have converged. The child who emerges from the developmental literature — competent, theory-building, social, expressive in many modes — looks remarkably like the child Malaguzzi asked his teachers to imagine in 1945, standing in the rubble, rich in potential.

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