Participation and social management

This is the fourth in Reggio Children's "Fragments" series dedicated to making Loris Malaguzzi's writing, and his talks at conferences and professional learning meetings, available to a wider public. The texts in this volume are dedicated to the themes of participation and social management: Loris Malaguzzi offers a complex and culturally profound idea of participation, presenting it as a "constituent fact" of education in Reggio Emilia's municipal infant-toddler centres and preschools. Participation as a professional trait of school workers, as the full entitlement of children to the right to be involved in their own growth, and as recognition that parents can be interlocutors in the entire educational project. These reflections dismantle a consolidated idea of participation reduced to good relations, often of an individual nature, that services establish with parents, and of participation considered as a sort of activism in connection with school parties, with ratifying decisions already made, and supporting fragile families and parents.