From the Inside Out: Reggio Emilia and the Practice of Inner & Cultural Pedagogy in Higher Education
- Louise Sommer
- Dec 2, 2025
- 4 min read
Updated: 6 hours ago
Like I wrote in my earlier blog about encountering the Reggio Emilia method, I still remember my first morning walking through the small cobblestoned streets of Florence. The air was warm, carrying the scent of espresso and freshly baked pastry.
Years down the track, I came to realise that my time with the Reggio Emilia method taught me that teaching, when lived fully, is not about control but about culture: a living dialogue between people, ideas, creation, and place.
The studio within
In the Reggio Emilia method, a classroom is called an atelier, meaning a “studio of becoming.” That phrase stayed with me long after I left Italy. But it was this experience that made me begin to see teaching, too, as a studio and understand pedagogy as an inner space where observation and imagination meet. Ideally, this is how an auditorium should feel in higher education.
In my own practice as an educational psychologist and coach, I’ve learned that presence is not passive. It’s a form of deep attention, and what Antonio Damasio describes as the feeling of what happens. Presence regulates our nervous system, and through that, it regulates the dynamics in the classroom.
When university lecturers cultivate this kind of attention, they become attuned to the subtle languages of human systems: the pauses, the tone shifts, the patterns beneath performance. These are the “hundred languages” of children that Loris Malaguzzi spoke of, expressed in adults as empathy, humour, silence, creativity, and gesture. This also works when developing complex intelligence and knowledge in students and colleagues.
My own studio is filled with sketches, notes, stories, and cultural adventures. It’s not tidy, but it’s honest. And that honesty becomes guidance. Human pedagogy begins when we can witness our own learning with compassion. Perhaps now you can see where the inspiration for my own business name came from.
Inside the school, the children’s artwork shone like stained glass: light, texture, movement. Every surface spoke. Every corner felt alive.
I came to learn that, in these classrooms, effective teaching wasn’t a set of instructions on a whiteboard; it was something breathing in the atmosphere. The educators weren’t dictating from above. They were in conversation with curiosity itself.
Belonging before mastery
Reggio Emilia was born from community trauma and hope. After the Second World War, Italian parents wanted schools that would teach children to think freely and belong without obedience. That social reconstruction still feels radical today.
Edgar Schein’s research later confirmed what these Italian educators had intuited: culture eats strategy for breakfast. Belonging precedes mastery. Students and educators alike risk creativity only where they feel seen.
When I work with university lecturers across cultures, from Scandinavia to Australia, I see the same principle emerge. Where belonging is absent, performance becomes performance anxiety. Where it is present, innovation feels like play.
I have therefore come to realise that cultural pedagogy is not a policy initiative; it’s an atmosphere. It grows from shared narratives, open minds, and shared experiences. Something we could call the everyday grammar of trust.
The hundred languages of Teaching
Each culture teaches its own rhythm of expression. In Denmark (Scandinavia), silence often means reflection; in Australia, it can mean distance. In creative learning psychology, we call this relational literacy: the ability to read the hidden codes of connection. And it differs from culture to culture, country to country.
The Reggio Emilia method teaches us that language is always plural. So is learning in higher
education. Educators guide not only through words but through the spaces they create: the lighting of a room, the pace of a discussion, the order of a day. These sensory details communicate safety or threat long before a single word is spoken.
Daniel Goleman’s extensive work on emotional intelligence echoes this beautifully: awareness precedes empathy, and empathy precedes influence. Today I have come to believe that effective teaching begins in the nervous system, not in the lesson plan.
When systems tighten, stay human
I often think about those Italian teachers when I watch the rise of artificial intelligence in education. They were resisting automation long before we used the word. Their classrooms were laboratories of human presence.
We need that resistance again! Not against technology itself, but against disconnection. AI can extend cognition, but it cannot extend compassion. The real task is to build learning cultures where tools serve curiosity, not replace it.
As Peter Senge wrote in The Fifth Discipline, “Learning organisations are where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire.”
Reggio Emilia was one of the first places I saw that happening. Not through corporate language, rules, or control, but in laughter, clay, and sunlight.
A Living Culture of Pedagogy
Each time I returned home from Florence, I realised a little more that the Reggio Emilia approach wasn’t necessarily about children. It was all about humanity.
It showed me that inner pedagogy is the craft of attention, cultural pedagogy is the craft of belonging, and storytelling is the craft of memory.
When we weave these crafts together, we create living learning cultures; innovative, connected environments that think, feel, and grow. So much of higher education still separates head from heart, analysis from aesthetics. Yet life keeps teaching us the opposite: wisdom is embodied, relational, and sensory.
The most effective educators I meet are often those who still notice things: light on a wall, the tone of a silence, deep reflections, a calm nervous system, the small turning point in a student’s story. Imagine if we understood that sensitivity is not fragility but intelligence in motion.
Creativity is not a luxury
Reggio Emilia continues to remind me that creativity is not a luxury. It’s how societies heal, how educators stay awake, and how communities remember themselves. And it keeps returning to my life, bringing new inspiration, new understanding, and new knowledge.
When we teach with creative intelligence, we don’t impose order; we cultivate life. Perhaps that’s what the world needs most: educators who can hold the complexity of a hundred languages and still listen.
I would love to hear your reflections on this topic. Join the conversation on LinkedIn.
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