BOOK In Dialogue with Reggio Emilia, Carlina Rinaldi

A Conversation That Stays Open

Reflections by Rebecca Fox

Some books leave you with answers. Others, like In Dialogue with Reggio Emilia, leave you inside the question.

Carlina Rinaldi isn’t offering a framework or method. She’s asking what it might mean to listen—really listen—to children, to colleagues, to the world. And not just to gather input, but to be changed. To be in dialogue that never finishes, where meaning is co-created and continually unfolding.

Drawn from lectures and essays across many years, this book reflects the evolving heartbeat of the Reggio Emilia project. There’s no how-to here. No list of practices. What we’re given instead is something quieter and more demanding: a pedagogy grounded in presence, uncertainty, and ethical relationship.

The Practice of Listening

Listening, in Rinaldi’s work, is not a step in a cycle. It’s not passive. It’s not even about gathering more information.

It’s an ethical orientation—what she calls ascolto. A way of being with others that is marked by curiosity, humility, and openness to transformation. “Listening is an active verb,” she reminds us. It requires the suspension of certainty. It invites us to dwell in not-knowing, and to resist the rush to name or fix.

When we listen in this way, the roles of adult and child begin to shift. The child becomes a full participant in meaning-making. The teacher becomes porous, willing to be shaped by the encounter. And the classroom becomes a shared space of inquiry, not a site of delivery.

Rinaldi reminds us that to truly listen is to take a risk—the risk of seeing differently. Of becoming different.

The Teacher as Researcher

What if teaching were a form of research? Not research as a method or institutional demand, but research as stance—as a way of living the day.

This is the pivot at the center of Reggio-inspired education. Teachers are not transmitters of knowledge. They are observers, co-learners, question-askers.

Rinaldi writes about this with clarity and care. Research is not something that happens after the moment; it is the moment. It is a disposition of attentiveness and wonder. And it reshapes how we see both children and ourselves.

Documentation becomes a part of this stance—not as assessment, but as trace. As memory. As mirror. We return to the documentation not to analyze the child but to reflect together, to see what we might have missed, to open the next question.

This is what makes the teacher’s role feel alive here. Not scripted. Not reactive. But deeply engaged in the unfolding of real meaning.

The Image We Hold

Throughout the book, one quiet question keeps resurfacing: What image of the child are we carrying?

This is not theoretical. The image we carry—of the child as capable or fragile, whole or broken—shapes everything. It shapes our tone, our environments, our expectations, our silences.

Rinaldi builds on the Reggio view of the child as competent, curious, relational. But she goes further. If we see the child this way, she asks, then what image of the adult follows?

We are not separate from the child’s learning. We are part of the relationship. We are not the observers standing off to the side. We are in it. And that carries responsibility—not to lead, but to respond with integrity, with presence, with openness.

There is no neutral space here. There is only the encounter.

A Political and Ethical Stance

One of the strengths of Rinaldi’s writing is her refusal to separate pedagogy from the world. Education, she insists, is a political act.

Not in the narrow sense of partisanship, but in the broader sense of living together. What we prioritize, what we silence, how we build environments—all of these are political decisions. They reveal what kind of future we’re rehearsing.

“Democracy is a journey that must be undertaken anew with each generation,” she writes. “Education is where that journey begins.”

In a time when education is increasingly managed, standardized, and flattened, Rinaldi’s vision feels both ancient and startlingly new. It is slow. Local. Deeply situated in relationship and meaning. It holds open space for disagreement, for ambiguity, for the dignity of not knowing yet.

It is, quite simply, a practice of living with care.

A Book of Presence, Not Prescription

There is no list to check off here. This book is not interested in giving you answers.

It is a practice text—a companion for those willing to live the questions.

Reading In Dialogue with Reggio Emilia feels less like reading a book and more like entering a conversation. A wide, slow, wondering conversation where ideas are shaped in community, not in isolation.

It’s a book to sit with. To underline. To revisit in the middle of the year, when the questions feel harder. To bring to a staff meeting, not to quote, but to ask: What are we really listening to right now?

This isn’t just about education. It’s about relational life. About the practice of being with others in ways that are ethical, democratic, and tender.

Key Takeaways & Next Steps

For Teachers, Parents, and Those in Relationship with Children

What You Can Do Tomorrow

• Ask yourself: What am I listening for? What am I willing to hear?
• Try documenting one interaction—not to analyze, but to remember and reflect.
• In conversation with a child, pause longer. Let silence stretch. See what unfolds.

Longer-Term Shifts to Consider

• Shift from delivering learning to co-researching it.
• Build reflection into your rhythm—not as an add-on, but as a core part of practice.
• Reexamine your image of the child. Is it static or evolving? Does it make room for strength, struggle, contradiction?

Questions to Live With

• What kind of world am I shaping through my way of being with children?
• How can I stay inside the question without rushing to solution?
• Who or what am I not listening to—and why?

Challenge Your Assumptions

• What if education isn’t about improvement or mastery?
• What if the point isn’t to reach clarity, but to stay in dialogue?

Related Resources

• Bringing Reggio Emilia Home by Louise Boyd Cadwell
• The Hundred Languages of Children edited by Carolyn Edwards, Lella Gandini, and George Forman
• Pedagogical Documentation in Early Childhood by Susan Stacey
• Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Related Books and Resources

• The Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Experience in Transformation – Carolyn Edwards, Lella Gandini, George Forman
• Making Learning Visible: Children as Individual and Group Learners – Project Zero and Reggio Children
• Reggio Children Official Site – Resources, exhibitions, and documentation
• Lella Gandini’s Recommendations on Reggio Books – A curated list of core texts