The Wonder of Learning

The Wonder of Learning owes its birth and has its roots in The Hundred Languages of Children, which since 1981 has recounted experiences of the Reggio Emilia Approach to thousands of visitors around the world. The intent of the new exhibition is to make visible the values at the foundation of Reggio Emilia’s educational philosophy, and tell the story of how it has changed, the innovations and evolutions, through new projects in the city’s municipal infant-toddler centres and preschools.

The travelling exhibition began its journey in the United States in 2008 and has been shown in over forty different venues around the world. Acting as ’democratic piazza’ or square, and calling international attention to the importance of education and schools as places of discussion and exchange, the exhibition addresses all the diverse realities that exist in the world of education and the wider public.  

The exhibition was conceived to adapt to various venues with different characteristics, to form a dialogue with the places it is housed, with a structure and layout that can take many forms, and be configured in different ways. It is a flexible and modular exhibition, with a narrative structure and way of communicating that reflects the contemporary nature, the complexity and plurality of Reggio Emilia’s infant-toddler centres and preschools.  

IN DEPTH ANALYSIS
Exhibition structure

Introduction

The exhibition unfolds in six sections, with six nuclei or central themes around which twenty-three projects are shown and communicated using different media. 3D artefacts made by children, videos, paper materials, and audio recordings all allow for different levels of reading and deeper understanding.

The exhibition begins with the pedagogical theses of the Reggio Emilia Approach®, guidelines of coherence and transformation which have always characterised experience in Reggio Emilia’s infant-toddler centres and preschools, since the first showings of The Hundred Languages of Children. 

Dialogues with Places

The central focus of this project was to choose a place, start up a dialogue and relations with its forms, colours, light, sounds and smells, and arrive at the point of designing a work tuned to the place and its identity, thus modifying and enriching it. One of education’s tasks is to contrast a tendency to accept the vulgarity and lack of care of the environment we live in, and offer learning experience based on dialogues of discovery, questioning, and creation, with the places in our daily lives.

Dialogues with Material

A retrospective exhibition of Alberto Burri’s work in Reggio Emilia was the occasion for teachers, children and families to reflect, to make the educational processes connecting Reggio Emilia’s pedagogy with art and artists more explicit, and activate research capable of putting the creative processe of children and of artists – rather than their finished products – side by side.

Ray of Light

Children encounter light and natural phenomena with strategies that are both affective and relational, rational and cognitive. This project was an opportunity for research into light, in environments capable of magnifying curiosity and wonder, by amplifying phenomena and making them more spectacular.

The Enchantment of Writing

Between Marks and Writing is a project that researches and reflects on how children approach the codes of writing. Figurative Writing explores the relationship between writing and language, the expressive quality of text, the relations between word and image, and the potential for communication in the language of marks and drawing

Ideas and Projects

Ideas and stories, children’s thoughts and theories, video extracts and projects that can be seen, read and heard. The intention is to make visible the several different possibilities for dialogue and listening between the culture of childhood and contemporary culture in the city of Reggio Emilia.