NOT JUST ANYPLACE!

The film reconstructs the social-political, cultural and civic context in which the educational experience in Reggio Emilia has developed over almost a century of history: the precedents of Luigi Roversi’s Socialist Administration during the first decade of the XX century; the post-war events of the Liberation to the self-administered schools of the UDI; the mobilisation of women in the fifties; the political-administrative events following the crisis of July 1960; the opening of the first schools and the participation of the parents; Loris Malaguzzi’s first pedagogic experimentation and the successive in the seventies; the adoption of the New Regulations of the primary schools; the conception of the Exhibition of the Hundred Languages; the eighties with the explosion of international success and the internal economic crisis; until 1994, the year in which Loris Malaguzzi died and Reggio Children was founded. The film describes the links between pedagogy and social organisation, and between questions of economic-social order and political cultural problems, both local and national. The film shows how the relations among all these aspects have been transformed over time, in order to maintain unchanged the idea of a competent child and a secular vision of creativity. The materials that make up the film are made of images of the activities of the children in contemporary schools, of interviews with the main protagonists of Reggio policy and pedagogy, repertory material in super8 on the main events of the sixties and seventies linked to the schools, photographic material in black and white that describes both aspects of pedagogy and socio-political events linked to the schools from the beginning of the century to today. The leitmotif is the concept of “participation”: the schools are the expression of a local culture, of a collective action, but also of the social ability of always providing new forms of democratic administration.