Katz – intellectual content in Reggio Emilia programs

I was, as usual, visiting schools and working with teachers, and I would begin to ask the question, “When I observe teachers interacting with children, what is the content?” and I was amazed how much of it was what we call ‘housekeeping’.  “Don’t forget to hang up your jacket, it’s time to come and wash your hands, stand in line over by the door before we go outside, you, where’s your lunchbox?”  All of this kind of housekeeping, but there was no real intellectual content.  About what you’re planning to do next, and how far did you get, and do you need any help with this, and so on, and I, I saw a lot of that really good content in Reggio Emilia, which some of you might be familiar with, these wonderful pre-schools in a small town in northern Italy where they, what they do is quite remarkable, and there are many things that are remarkable about it, but one of them is there’s lots of rich content because the children are making things and investigating things, and trying to figure out how to represent.   

I watched a videotape there recently with four, four year old boys were together at a small table, and they were, they had decided, I don’t know how they decided, or why, but they were going to make out of clay, a table.  So they had a big clump of clay on the table, and they took pieces of it and were rolling it to make the legs for the table.  So they’d roll it and say, “Oh this is a leg!” and by the way, constantly talking to each other through this.  And stand it up, but it curled over, so they said, “Oh it’s not standing.  Maybe, maybe if I add more clay,” and so there’s a lot of talk, and another child would say, “I got it right, ‘cause mine’s thicker!”  And so all this conversation, eventually they got the four legs, pretty thick legs.  And then they took a big clump of clay together to make the tabletop, and they were rubbing it hard, and they argued, is it going to be round or square,  should we do it this way or that way, a lot of talk, it’s so important, there’s something to talk about.  They finally finished it, and they picked it up, and they put it on top of the legs and it collapsed.  And they said, “too heavy, try it again.”  Now that’s just a very quick picture of what happened, but they must have worked on it for, I would say, about forty minutes.  A lot of talk, trying things, what didn’t work, and this worked, and that didn’t, so there’s content for the relationship, that’s real, not phony.  So that’s one of my concerns about what kind of content do the children’s interactions have?  You’ve got to have something interesting going on to make rich content.