What is Reggio Emilia Approach to Play Therapy?
Reggio Emilia is an pedagogical approach committed to the creation of conditions for the child to learn, grow, and develop through synthesis of all the expressive, communicative, and cognitive languages. This approach was first developed in Reggio Emilia, Italy, and has since because a model around the world. The Reggio framework of working with children is a valuable resource to educators, parents/caretakers, counselors, clinicians, and anybody working with children in any capacity.
Applications for Play Therapy in Parenting and Child Counseling:
Reggio Emilia philosophy ties into the foundation of play therapy. Rather than expecting kids to engage in an “adult-like” intellectual exchange with us (parents/teachers/counselors/caregivers), we need to communicate with the children in their own language and develop a way to understand what they are communicating to us in their own language. What does their language look like? It is not English, or Spanish, or Chinese. It is creative and abstract and takes many different forms. Kids communicate through the games they play, the pictures they draw, the singing and the whining, the laughter and the tears, the hitting and the hugging, the tantrums and the joyful bursts of energy, the questions they ask, the books they like to read.
Any behavior, regardless of how frustrating, annoying, or not socially-acceptable to adults, is a form of communication. The kids don’t “misbehave,” they don’t have “anger issues.” They are trying to tell us something with their behavior. They are trying to communicate a need. If only we would listen.
“The hundred languages” are a metaphor for the extraordinary potential of the children, their knowledge-building and creative processes, the myriad forms with which life is manifested and knowledge is constructed.
No Way. The Hundred is There.
poem by Loris Malaguzzi (translated by Lella Gandini)
The child is made of one hundred.
The child has
a hundred languages
a hundred hands
a hundred thoughts
a hundred ways of thinking
of playing, of speaking.
A hundred always a hundred
ways of listening
of marveling of loving
a hundred joys
for singing and understanding
a hundred worlds
to discover
a hundred worlds
to invent
a hundred worlds
to dream.
The child has
a hundred languages
(and a hundred hundred hundred more)
but they steal ninety-nine.
The school and the culture
separate the head from the body.
They tell the child:
to think without hands
to do without head
to listen and not to speak
to understand without joy
to love and to marvel
only at Easter and Christmas.
They tell the child:
to discover the world already there
and of the hundred
they steal ninety-nine.
They tell the child:
that work and play
reality and fantasy
science and imagination
sky and earth
reason and dream
are things
that do not belong together.
And thus they tell the child
that the hundred is not there.
The child says:
No way. The hundred is there.