EdSight

Loris Malaguzzi was born on 23 February 1920 in Correggio, a small city in the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy, and moved with his family to the city of Reggio Emilia at the age of three, the place where he would live and work for the rest of his life. He trained as an elementary school teacher and, following the liberation of Italy from fascist rule at the end of the Second World War, encountered the ideas of John Dewey — whose writings had been banned under Mussolini — through his studies with Italian Deweyan scholar Bruno Ciari at the University of Bologna. The moment that permanently redirected his professional life came in the immediate aftermath of the war, when he rode his bicycle to the village of Villa Cella to investigate rumours that local citizens were building a school from the rubble of bombed-out houses. The women of the village had insisted that the proceeds from selling an abandoned tank be used to construct a school for young children, believing that education was the antidote to the dehumanising systems of power that had devastated their community. Malaguzzi described his ride home as “festive”: the encounter overturned his assumptions about pedagogy, culture, and the possibilities of education, and it launched the life's project he had just discovered. He was also a founder of a mental health centre serving children with school difficulties, and he drew on Piaget's developmental psychology — later subjecting it to systematic critique — as well as the ideas of Vygotsky, Froebel, Montessori, Rousseau, Freire, Bruner, Gardner, and a wide range of philosophers, neuroscientists, architects, and artists across countless disciplines. In 1963, under Malaguzzi's leadership, Reggio Emilia's municipal government opened its first officially operated scuola dell'infanzia for children aged three to six; in 1971 the first municipal infant-toddler centre followed. The preschools of Reggio Emilia were named among the best schools in the world by Newsweek in 1991, catapulting Malaguzzi's educational project onto the international stage. He died suddenly on 30 January 1994 at the age of seventy-three, leaving behind an educational philosophy that continues to inspire educators on every inhabited continent.

At the centre of Malaguzzi's educational philosophy was a particular and demanding conception of who children are — what he called the “image of the child.” He argued that every educator holds, whether consciously or not, an internal theory of the child that shapes every decision about how to speak, listen, and respond. The image of the child that Malaguzzi worked to articulate and defend was of a being who is strong, intelligent, curious, resourceful, and endowed with “rights” that include the right to be taken seriously as a thinker and researcher. “The child is made of one hundred,” he wrote in his famous poem No Way. The Hundred Is There: a child with a hundred languages, a hundred hands, a hundred thoughts, a hundred ways of thinking, playing, speaking. This was not a sentimental or romantic conception but a philosophical and political one: Malaguzzi argued that images of the child as fragile, incomplete, or weak serve the interests of the adults who hold them rather than the interests of children, and that schools organised around such images systematically constrain children's capacities rather than releasing them. The image of the child as a competent, curious researcher with intrinsic rights demanded a corresponding image of the adult as a researcher, collaborator, and careful listener — not an authority who transmits knowledge to passive recipients.

Malaguzzi was drawn to the methods of psychological research — particularly close, systematic observation — as tools that educators could adapt for pedagogical purposes. He encouraged teachers to keep observation notebooks, filling them with significant events from their work and the various behaviours of children, and to treat these records as raw material for building theories about how learning happens. Documentation — the systematic making-visible of children's learning processes through photographs, transcribed conversations, work samples, and teacher commentary — served several purposes simultaneously: it made children's thinking visible to themselves and to their parents, creating new possibilities for dialogue; it gave teachers evidence with which to refine their theories and revise their practices; and it demonstrated to the broader community the seriousness and complexity of young children's intellectual and creative activity. In Reggio Emilia, Malaguzzi insisted that research, observation, and documentation were not merely tools for teachers but necessary pedagogical experiences for children as well: children are natural researchers driven by “epistemological curiosity,” and the teacher's role is to support and sustain this curiosity by creating conditions in which children can investigate questions that genuinely matter to them, observe their own thinking, and document their discoveries.

One of Malaguzzi's most provocative and influential ideas is the concept of the school environment as an active educational agent — the “third teacher,” alongside the child's peers and the child's teachers. Classrooms in Reggio Emilia are not neutral containers for instruction but intentionally designed spaces that reflect the emerging interests and experiences of the school community, filled with a rich and carefully organised array of diverse materials, arranged to support small-group encounter and exchange, and designed to communicate to children that their presence, their work, and their thinking are valued and taken seriously. Every space in the school — kitchen, bathrooms, hallways, the central common area called the piazza — belongs to children as much as to adults, and each space has an identity of its own that contributes to the rhythm of communal life. Malaguzzi articulated the relationship between his image of the child and his philosophy of environment with characteristic directness: “The environment you construct around you and the children also reflects this image you have about the child.” The concept of the environment as the third teacher has been one of the most widely adopted aspects of the Reggio Emilia approach globally, prompting educators to reconceive classroom design not as an infrastructural matter but as a fundamental pedagogical decision.

Malaguzzi's conception of the “hundred languages” — the myriad modes through which children communicate, express, and make meaning, including drawing, sculpting, painting, woodworking, music, puppetry, dance, and verbal language — was a direct challenge to educational systems that privilege written and spoken language as the only legitimate vehicles of thought and understanding. He argued that by recognising and cultivating all hundred languages, schools could both deepen children's understanding and honour the full range of their expressive and intellectual capacities. The institutional expression of this conviction was the atelier — a studio space within the school, staffed by an atelierista (a teacher with specialised training in the visual and creative arts), in which children could work in small groups with a rich array of materials, exchange ideas, and encounter new perspectives. Malaguzzi described the atelier as “most of all a place for research” — a laboratory in which the kinds of transdisciplinary, multi-modal experiences he believed were essential for deep learning could flourish. The presence of the atelierista within the teaching team also symbolised Malaguzzi's commitment to the equality of different knowledge domains and the artificial nature of boundaries between arts and sciences, cognition and expression.

Education in Reggio Emilia is, at its deepest level, a hypothesis about democracy — about what it means for children, teachers, families, and the community to participate genuinely in the processes that shape their lives. Malaguzzi described his educational project as “a hypothesis of participatory education” that recognises and enacts “the needs and rights of children, families, teachers, and school workers, actively to feel part of a solidarity of practices and ideals.” This was not merely a rhetorical commitment: the structures of Reggio Emilia's schools — co-teaching in every classroom (to prevent the isolation of teachers), the pedagogista as a pedagogical coordinator and support for teachers, the systematic involvement of families in the life of the school, and the ongoing practice of public documentation — were all designed to make participation substantive rather than nominal. Malaguzzi drew a direct line between this democratic practice within the school and the broader democratic aspirations of the post-fascist community that had built the first school in Villa Cella: education that valued the participation of every member of its community was, for him, the most effective inoculation against the return of authoritarian systems that silenced individual judgment and subordinated persons to ideology.

Malaguzzi's legacy is embodied most directly in the schools of Reggio Emilia themselves, which have continued to develop and renew their educational project in the decades since his death, welcoming visitors from every continent and engaging in ongoing research, documentation, and exchange through Reggio Children — the international organisation established after his death to valorise and safeguard the Reggio Emilia approach — and the Loris Malaguzzi International Centre, opened in 2006 as a space for encounter, research, and innovation. International networks of educators inspired by his ideas now exist on virtually every continent. The unfinished dimensions of his work are significant: his sudden death left plans unrealised and questions unanswered. His concept of the hundred languages remains more fully theorised in relation to art and design than to language, science, or mathematics; the conditions under which the Reggio Emilia approach can be authentically translated to contexts with very different cultural, economic, and institutional arrangements remain contested; and the tension between the radical, open-ended quality of his vision and the institutional imperatives of systematic teacher formation and programme fidelity continues to generate productive disagreement among those who claim his legacy. Perhaps most importantly, Malaguzzi's consistent refusal of “prophetic pedagogy” — his insistence on remaining genuinely uncertain, genuinely open, genuinely curious — represents a stance toward teaching that is easier to admire than to practise, and that every generation of educators committed to his vision must rediscover for itself.

• Malaguzzi, L. (1994). Your image of the child: Where teaching begins. Exchange, 3, 52–56.
• Malaguzzi, L. (2012). No. The hundred is there. In C. Edwards, L. Gandini, & G. Forman (Eds.), The Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Experience in Transformation (3rd ed., p. 3). Praeger.
• Malaguzzi, L. (2014). The 'what to do' of teachers. Innovations, 2, 6–7.
• Cagliari, P., Castagnetti, M., Giudici, C., Rinaldi, C., Vecchi, V., & Moss, P. (Eds.). (2016). Loris Malaguzzi and the Schools of Reggio Emilia: A Selection of his Writings and Speeches, 1945–1993. Routledge.