A reflective approach to educational “design”

The purpose of this article is to offer a comprehensive outline of the intents, processes and results of a research, training and experimentation project which involved educators, teachers, pedagogists and external trainers. This project resulted in a long process of redefinition of a “design approach to education within a network of municipality-run infant-toddlers centres and preschools located within the Province of Reggio Emilia (IT). If we conceive “progettazione” (design) as a research-oriented approach, as an educational and training process in which the aspects of “progettazione”, action and evaluation constantly intertwine, “progettazione” turns into a strategy that sustains the collaborative construction of the knowledge of both adults and children together. Our experience was about acting out a projectural structure with the potential to generate change and characterised by systematic and recursive processes of observation, documentation, evaluation (interpretation) and feedback about the learning experience and the processes implemented therein. In particular, the processes of evaluation and self-evaluation utilised by the team, and deeply connected to the phases of reflection and meaning-building, provided room for the articulation of the strategies employed and for the levels of knowledge progressively acquired by the children. The intent of defining our design approach highlighted the necessity of recognizing the fundamental importance of some underlying structures of the pedagogical project, which constituted the starting point of our reflections: the educational context, the relation between families and educational institutions, the team group (made up of educators, teachers, auxiliary personnel, “atelierista” and pedagogical coordinator). In order to build new competences and new viewpoints, teachers slowly veered towards a different posture: that of a curious researcher who managed to elaborate the itineraries to knowledge and acquire a new awareness generated by common learning spaces thanks to continuous interchange between action and reflection in cooperation with one’s colleagues.