While on sabbatical, I have been thinking a lot about creativity and how it is valued within the Reggio Emilia schools. This concentrated focus has increased my awareness of the power of creativity as it intersects with learning, and now I see it everywhere. For example, my five-year-old son, Enzo, has a range of sticks that are personal artifacts of his day spent in the forest. Each stick has a name and purpose, along with rocks he has been bringing home to hammer and chisel, no doubt inspired by all the sculptures he regularly sees around in public. He reminds me that as Malaguzzi suggests, children have incredibly creative ways of thinking about and using materials. This creativity extends to how they wonder about the world, and there is a special freedom in the ideas of children. We must stop and pause to notice how this creative thinking lends itself to childrens’ hypotheses about how things work and connections throughout our world. 

As sunlight filters through tall glass doors, it illuminates multiple shades of blue paint in glass jars, translucent  sheets of color that dance and invite curiosity. Greenery, such as plants, trees, and flowers spread throughout the space inviting the outside in. Different shades of clay are placed in mounds on tables with natural materials beside them, ready for interpretation. The aroma of homemade bread and fresh cut fruit wafts in from the kitchen, and the art, words, photos, and other documentation of the daily lives of children who inhabit this space smile proudly on the walls. These are some of the beautiful and inviting materials, senses, and spaces I’ve observed in Reggio Emilia classrooms, artfully designed for young children. 

This winter, the north swells kicked up to historic levels, bringing waves beyond anything in living memory. They ran The Eddie on an epic day after calling it off a week earlier. The Eddie is a big wave surf competition that only goes in the rarest of conditions, massive swells with good winds. But really, The Eddie is more than a surf competition. It is a celebration of Waimea Bayʻs first lifeguard, Eddie Aikau, more than anything else. 

In the opening sentence of William Haye’s (2007) book, The Progressive Education Movement, he states, “For some time now, I have accepted the idea that a major theme in the history of education in the United States during the past century has been the ongoing debate between those who consider themselves traditionalists and those who espouse the principles of progressive education (p. xi). “ This debate and need to distinguish between what constitutes a progressive philosophy and pedagogy, compared to more “traditional” approaches to education is well-documented and has no doubt played an important role in the evolution of the American progressive education movement. It has helped progressive educators clarify and define what they mean by a “progressive education” for both the movement’s critics and followers. It has also helped to create charts like Haye’s (2007, p. ?) below, which didactically delineates the difference between traditional and progressive approaches to education.

At the end of their journey in the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (UHM), College of Education (COE), Progressive Philosophy and Pedagogy, MEd Curriculum Studies program, master's candidates applied the process of philosophical reflection to explore the meaning of their experiences in the program. In collaboration with peers and professors they engaged in a creative process to “untangle” and illuminate lessons learned about progressive education during the five semesters of the program. They were asked to communicate their reflections to a wider audience via a thought provoking and artful film that could be shared with a wider audience. The overarching question guiding the reflective process and ultimately the film was: Why progressive philosophy and pedagogy?

In 2023, it is almost impossible to escape some form of the “culture wars” being waged in the “battle grounds” of classrooms and libraries. There are book challenges and bans, vocal opposition to school curricula, and the ever looming threats of misinformation and disinformation. Solutions to these problems are evasive; they cannot be addressed with a single-pronged approach. It will take the support and mobilization of an entire network–our network of progressive educators around the world “harnessing the dynamic power of progressive practice for the next generation of students, schools, and democracy” (PEN, 2023). An essential element of this network are our school librarians and the best practices of 21st-century librarianship, which are deeply rooted in a progressive philosophy and pedagogy.

An often underemphasized and misunderstood essential element of the progressive education movement is its relationship with scientific research. The idea that teaching, learning, and schooling must be systematically studied through observation and experiment has been a defining feature of progressive education philosophy and pedagogy from the very beginning. “As much as they wore their hearts on their sleeves,” early progressive educators like Francis W. Parker, John Dewey, and Ella Flagg Young “prided themselves on their allegiance to science, culling ideas from research from all over the world and exhaustively testing their hypothesis and methods” (Little & Ellison, 2015, p.41).