Why The Reggio Emilia Approach In Early Education Is Important: Educator Swati Popat Vats

0:00 and parents are the sarpanch of that Village so if you are not able to convince the sarpanch forget about any change happening you know the ECA recently launched their first play policy and I I want to ask you how are Indian parents um perceiving the importance of play versus the global counterparts okay so I would give credit to Reggio Emilia is a town in Italy which is where the

0:30 municipality of that town set up these play schools after the second world war so when this town was destroyed during the second world war they they decided what should we rebuild first should we rebuild the church the homes or schools and that's when they decided if we rebuild the schools first children would be busy in the schools and we couldn't rebuild the town then and Reggio Emilia is a concept based completely on play and Reggio Emilia has a poem called the

0:59 hundred languages of children and it's such a beautiful poem and it says that children have a hundred languages but we the school culture and Society steal the 99 and then we tell the child that there is only one language you know which is what we are doing as parents so Global Community has woken up to this concept almost 25 years back and I I think because the radio exhibition used to go to different countries associations like ours like

1:27 you have the nayc in USA you have the ECA that's the Early Childhood Australia in Australia they worked hard to ensure that it comes to policy makers so they have gone to the government changed things in the government because once you change things in the government it changes in the school it changes in the school the parents have to accept it India has just woken up to it and that's why I said thanks to the National

1:52 Education policy which is now mandating that it should be experiential learning and play hopefully it will come sadly our country education is a concurrent subject which means every state will now you know hosh posh they'll make of the national curriculum framework and bring their own State curriculum framework but I hope play remains but if we really wanted to remain each one of us has a duty that that's what I tell everybody you have a parent sitting next to you

2:19 I'm my husband refuses to sit with me in flights because he says you will catch every parent and you will start talking to them because they would have all bought a screen you know to keep the child busy and I carry with me blocks and toys in my bag because I know there will be a parent on my flight who will have a screen so I give those to the child and I tell the parent now look how

2:39 she's interested why do you carry that screen so it's important that parents let's not look at them as villains it's time we understood that it's a community takes a village to raise a child right and parents are the sarpanch of that Village so if you are not able to convince the sarpanch forget about any change happening and I think that's why your group Lego everybody is doing this work to coming together and I'm sure there's going to be change in India

3:09 [Music] foreign thank you