News from NAREA

My first reaction to "The Hundred Languages of Children" exhibit was very similar to my first encounter with the Grand Canyon. I walked to the edge of the canyon with friends in the summer of 1970 and I thought, "nice rocks - it looks like the postcards." My friends sat mesmerized by the edge for several hours while I waited in the parking lot for them to return. It was so grand, immense and overwhelming yet so unfamiliar that I couldn't figure a way to enter the experience. I knew it was beautiful and majestic but totally out of any experience I had encountered previously. It seemed complicated yet simple. A question formed, "Now what do I do with this experience?"

I've made many trips back to the Grand Canyon since that first experience and found many different paths and entry points to enter its depth and complexity. During my last trip to the Grand Canyon, I spent a lot of time in the gift shop buying every book I could find on the geological history and development of the Canyon. My husband found me in the gift shop and remarked, "You know, the real thing is right out there!"

My first encounter with "The Hundred Languages of Children" exhibit was in Chicago in the summer of 1997. I made a 10-minute survey of it and returned to the conference. It was unfamiliar, grand and overwhelming and I couldn't imagine how I would enter the experience. It was foreign to me. As I have been inspired and have studied this philosophy for the last 20 years, I was comforted by Carla Rinaldi's words at the 2007 NAREA Summer Conference, "We are all foreigners in our own culture." This approach to children is contrary to many of the ideas and practices in education in all countries. It is deeper, grander, more complex and more challenging than we are accustomed to encountering.

The exhibit has become an old friend and companion, yet my first response was "flight" when Amelia Gambetti first came to our school in 1994 and suggested we have the exhibit in our city. But after experiencing the exhibit in Chicago, Oakland, Atlanta, Columbus and Oberlin, "The Hundred Languages of Children" did arrive in our city, Saint Paul. In preparation for the arrival of the exhibit in Saint Paul, Sandy Burwell, one of our Education Coordinators and I traveled to Oberlin Ohio. Our encounter with the exhibit in Oberlin was a spiritual experience. We spent hours in the exhibit, and it surrounded and supported us - offering its depth and beauty and simplicity and complexity. It felt as if we were really seeing it for the first time. It was for us a three-dimensional representation of the Reggio Emilia philosophy, similar to being in a Reggio classroom in Italy. We were surrounded by photographs, conversations of children and their visual expressions. The image of the child and the depth of children's thinking gave us a tangible vision and goal for our work with our children.

The exhibit's presence in Saint Paul called us to be more deeply ourselves, more authentic in our relationships and co-learning with children, parents and teachers, and more intentional with our environment to make it more personally reflective of the thinking and creativity of our school community - children, parents and teachers.

Each community makes a choice when they ask for the presence of the exhibit in their midst. Some communities prepare for years to welcome the exhibit through:
� the development of a professional network of educators;
� the organization of study tours of community leaders to Reggio Emilia, Italy;
� professional development conferences;
� school tours; and
� the development of steering committees.
These communities have a long period of preparation before the exhibit arrives.

Other communities may have a shorter planning period, and invite the exhibit into their communities and culture as a provocation for professional development and a vision of what could happen to the education in their community. A large stone drops into the lake and then the ripples begin. I believe that is what happened in Saint Paul and five years later, we are still seeing the effects of our powerful visitor.

I invite each of you to encounter this new powerful visitor in our midst, "The Wonder of Learning - The Hundred Languages of Children," which is now touring communities in North America through the collaboration of NAREA and Reggio Children.

Be comfortable with your reactions, observations and the internal changes that it will provoke. Your encounter will be varied; you might enter it easily and quickly and then again, you may be paralyzed and unsure as to how to enter the experience, and challenged as to what it will mean for you and the children you encounter everyday. In any case, as you enter the exhibit, the exhibit will also enter you and take you to places you haven't been before. The experience will create ripples of change, and deeper and more meaningful opportunities for your growth, and touch the lives of everyone you encounter each day.