The goal of this study was to track the progress of Italian children at risk for school failure enrolled in preschools based on the Reggio-Emilia approach. Risk factors considered included family ...socioeconomic status (SES), child receptive language, and child gender. Participants were 211 children (Mage = 60.8 months, 116 girls) in Reggio-inspired preschools in Genoa, Italy. The sample was followed over six time points starting from the last year of preschool (ages 5–6 years) through the end of the second year of elementary school. We examined trajectories of school liking, teacher–child relationships, and teacher-rated language/mathematics. Trajectories of at-risk children were predominantly indistinguishable from those of the full sample. Children at risk because of lower SES and poorer receptive language (but not gender) were rated by teachers as more dependent than children not identified as at risk. Contrary to expectations, children of mothers from low-SES backgrounds liked school more than the rest of the sample.
Purpose
Using a postqualitative inquiry approach, the purpose of this paper is to make sense of playful making events that took place at a community makerspace during an afterschool enrichment ...opportunity and to explore those events as ways we might deterritorialize traditional composition practices and pedagogies in the literacy classroom.
Design/methodology/approach
Thinking alongside theories (Jackson and Mazzei, 2012) of (de/re)territorialization, becoming (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) and intimacy with objects (Bennett, 2010), the author argues that children are always, already engaged in writing practices through their everyday maker literacies.
Findings
By analyzing three different moments when young people were engaged in self-directed maker literacies, this paper illustrates how children’s playful compositions are writing practices and mimic many of the skills teachers seek out during more traditional writing instruction. The author also argues that literacy educators must deterritorialize their own practices to notice the ways children are engaged in these skills.
Originality/value
Written as a narrative, this paper adds to the ever-growing body of work that suggests seeing humans/nonhuman objects as being in co-relational partnerships offers us new ways to conceptualize literacy practice. Additionally, rather than call for a dismissal of traditional practices, the author encourages us to add to existing practices for a more robust and creative engagement with literacies.
The aim of the study presented in this article is to find out whether the documentation practices in German early childhood education and care (ECEC) centres are compatible with the notion of ...participation by children. Children's participation has to be seen as a general educational issue in the context of democratic and inclusive education, but also as a specific aim to foster the learning and reflective competencies of the individual child. This makes it all the more important to know whether participation can be found in early childhood key practices - for example documentation. The research examines the documentation practices in 40 ECEC centres in Germany. On this basis, the article outlines what the main forms of documentation are (portfolio, documentation panels, presentations of children's work) and what importance children's participation has for these forms. It shows that participation is of minor relevance in the documentation practices in most of the ECEC centres examined. Only a few centres involve children extensively in documentation and include documentation in their daily work. If participation is part of the documentation practices, a 'pedagogy of listening' as conceived by the Reggio approach can be found.
We evaluate the Reggio Approach using non-experimental data on individuals from the cities of Reggio Emilia, Parma and Padova belonging to one of five age cohorts: ages 50, 40, 30, 18, and 6 as of ...2012. The treated were exposed to municipally offered infant-toddler (ages 0–3) and preschool (ages 3–6) programs in Reggio Emilia. The control group either did not receive formal childcare or were exposed to programs offered by municipal systems (outside of Reggio Emilia), or by state or religious systems (in all three cities). We exploit the city-cohort structure of the data to estimate treatment effects using three strategies: difference-in-differences, matching, and matched-difference-in-differences. Most positive and significant effects are generated from comparisons of the treated with individuals who did not receive formal childcare. Relative to not receiving formal care, the Reggio Approach significantly boosts outcomes related to employment, socio-emotional skills, high school graduation, participation in elections, and obesity. Comparisons with individuals exposed to alternative forms of childcare do not yield strong patterns of positive and significant effects. This suggests that differences between the Reggio Approach and other alternatives are not sufficiently large to result in significant differences in outcomes. This interpretation is supported by a survey we conduct, which documents increasing similarities in the administrative and pedagogical practices of childcare systems in the three cities over time.
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