Educational philosophy
Within a cultural framework steeped in the educational values of Reggio Emilia’s municipal nurseries and preschools, the Totem Nursery School has gradually built its own identity, unique and original.
An identity that comes from the constant dialogue between educational thinking, research, and everyday life, between listening, care, and beauty as essential conditions for learning.
Our values
Girls and boys are active builders of their own learning, curious and skilled explorers who, through relationships with others and their surroundings, encounter many ways to understand and tell about the world. The adult educator, teacher, or workshop leader is alongside the children as a co-researcher, able to listen, document, and shape shared meaningful experiences.
The educational environment
The environment is seen as a living ecosystem of spaces, materials, and relationships.
The role of the adult
The adult is curious, attentive, thoughtful: a co-builder of knowledge together with the children.
Collegiality and professional growth
Working in a group encourages reflection, dialogue, and sharing decisions.
The hundred languages
The hundred languages represent children’s potential and the endless ways knowledge comes to life.
Every child has a hundred ways of thinking, expressing themselves, and learning: blending emotion, body, imagination, and reason.
The Totem Nursery School recognizes and values this diversity, creating learning environments every day that welcome and weave together all the languages — visual, auditory, physical, symbolic, and verbal.
Bilingualism as a language
At Totem, bilingualism is recognized as one of the hundred languages — a bridge between cultures, sounds, and ways of thinking.
Daily contact with two languages nourishes cognitive, linguistic, and social development.
Neuroscientific research confirms that early exposure to multiple languages strengthens neural connections, sparks creativity, and sharpens attention to the nuances of language and thought.
For children, bilingualism isn’t just about learning words, but a living experience of dialogue, identity, and openness to the world.
The culture of the studio
The workshop represents the soul of the school: a place where imagination, aesthetics, and thinking intertwine.
It is the affirmation of every child’s right to learn and engage with the world through a variety of expressive and creative forms.
The presence of the workshop facilitator enriches the work of the educational group, supporting processes of exploration and research that give value to the aesthetic, poetic, and expressive dimension of learning.
Through materials, colors, light, and movement, the workshop becomes a laboratory of wonder, where ideas take shape and knowledge turns into beauty.
The educational environment
The environment is designed as a living ecosystem of spaces, materials, and relationships. Every element—from the light to the color, from the arrangement of furniture to the presence of nature—is planned to welcome, inspire, and support children’s learning journeys. The aesthetic quality of the environment isn’t just decorative, but educational: it feeds curiosity, attention, and the joy of discovery. Having a green area allows children to experience nature every day through explorations, encounters, discoveries, and research.
Participation
Participation is a quality of the relationships that are built daily between children, adults, and families. It is both a value and a strategy that runs through all educational experiences. The Participation Council — made up of educators, teachers, a pedagogist, and parents — is an active space for dialogue, collaboration, and shared responsibility in school life.
The role of the adult
The adult is curious, attentive, thoughtful: a co-creator of knowledge alongside children. They observe, interpret, and design educational settings that turn relationships into meaningful learning experiences. They create the conditions for children’s independence, curiosity, and creativity to flourish, turning every interaction into a chance for growth.
Collegiality and professional growth
Working together reflects the way children learn together. Working in a group encourages reflection, dialogue, and sharing decisions. Having multiple educators present in the classroom every day ensures shared responsibility and ongoing discussion about the children’s learning processes.
Training is understood as an ongoing process, continuously fueled by research, study, and dialogue.
Having a pedagogue ensures consistency, quality, and continuous renewal of the shared educational project.
Observation, documentation, research
Observing, documenting, and interpreting are key tools to give visibility to children’s learning processes. Documentation allows us to reflect on educational practices and to make the culture of childhood visible to families and the community.
Research is a permanent attitude — for both children and adults — that values doubt, uncertainty, and curiosity as sources of innovation and renewal.
In this way, the Totem becomes a place of continuous learning, where education isn’t a fixed path, but a living process, constantly evolving.
Dialogues with the city
The city is an educational environment in every sense — full of stories, materials, encounters, and wonders to discover.
The location of the Totem Nursery School, near the historic center of Reggio Emilia, offers children a unique opportunity. A privileged chance to visit museums, libraries, and cultural sites that become natural extensions of the school: spaces where the inquiries started in the classroom or studio can find nourishment, dialogue, and new directions. Walking through the streets of the city with friends is a way to experience it more slowly, to notice its details, to listen to its rhythms — gradually building a deep sense of knowledge and belonging to the place where they grow up.
Even the nurseries and parks in the area become part of this dialogue: places where children meet nature, observe it, inhabit it — collecting seeds of curiosity that continue to sprout when they return to school
