The Reggio Emilia atelier as a place of disruption: remaking pedagogical alliances through aesthetics and experimentation

ABSTRACT

This article concerns itself with the potential for ateliers to disrupt conformist approaches to pedagogy in early childhood education and care. An illustration of the role of the atelier in amplifying the aesthetics of the experience of the educational project of Reggio Emilia illuminates how disruption of conformity can be activated through the pedagogical alliances that the atelier solicits, taking a broad view of such alliances to encompass correspondences between humans and materials. Insights are shared from a research project and installation, the Digital Investigations Atelier, a collaboration between academic-researchers and teacher-researchers who work with young children in a variety of education and care settings in Perth, Western Australia. Data that ‘glow’, which for some reason, possibly intangible, stood out, are shared to illuminate conceptual phases of aesthetics, alliances, and experimentation in the creation of the installation and its opening to visitors. The article contends that conventional pedagogies, those that yearn for the predictability of recipes by the minute and elevate neoliberalism’s longing for linearity, are devoid of aesthetics and experimentation, leaving little space for imagining correspondences. Instead, it is speculated that ateliers can be places of disruption, where pedagogical alliances can be re-imagined and remade through aesthetics and experimentation..

KEYWORDS:

• Reggio Emilia
• atelier
• experimentation
• aesthetics
• alliances

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge our valued team members for their passion, time, invention, and good humour. A special mention also to Quayola for generously sharing his acclaimed work with us and with the visitors to the atelier. We would also like to thank the Curtin University School of Education Professional Learning Hub and the Reggio Emilia Australia Information Exchange for supporting our research project, and the School of Education at Curtin University for providing the space to host the Digital Investigations Atelier. To our colleagues in Reggio Emilia, ongoing gratitude for their dedication to experimentation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stefania Giamminuti

Stefania Giamminuti is a bilingual Italian/Australian Senior Lecturer in Early Childhood Education, Curtin University, Western Australia. She draws on two decades of sustained research collaboration with Reggio Children and with the Municipal Infant-toddler Centres and Preschools, Istituzione of the Municipality of Reggio Emilia, to investigate possibilities for early childhood education and care as the common good. Stefania’s work questions boundaries between theory, research, and practice and is informed by philosophy and by aesthetic and ethico-political concepts. In her research, Stefania dialogues with approaches to post qualitative inquiry, illuminating the capabilities of teachers, children and materials as co-researchers through pedagogical documentation.

Jane Merewether

Jane Merewether is a Senior Lecturer at Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia. Drawing on her many years of experience as an early childhood teacher and her long-term engagement with the educational project of Reggio Emilia, Italy, Jane’s research and practice collaborations explore children’s common world relations and the entanglements of childhood studies, early childhood education, feminist new materialisms, and environmental humanities.