(Re)Announcement of meanings

metaphor and agency in the Reggio Emilia approach and in literary text

Abstract

The Reggio Emilia Approach argues that children create theories in their daily lives, also based on the proposing space (third educator). The use of unstructured materials, structured materials given new functions, and images encourages children's agency in exploring similarities and constructing new representations. This study aims to establish relationships between the agency activated in children in Reggio spaces, such as the “Ateliers”, which privilege visual metaphor, and the agency generated in the relationship with the verbal metaphor of literary text, taken here as an artistic and aesthetic object, privileging the discussion of metaphorical processes in the attribution of meaning, a crucial point in the Reggio Approach. This research is based on the bibliographic method and mainly grounded in Contini and Giuliani (2022), Eco (1991), Larrosa (2018), Manera (2022), Paz (2012), Schiller (2017), Sontag (2020), Urban (2013), and Vecchi (2017). Unstructured materials, structured materials that escape linearity in a propositional space, and literary metaphor come together to function as openings or entrances to a creative space, to the suspension of habitual representation and habitual theory, since symbolization is also the creation of theories about the symbolized. Thus, the aesthetic experience that the child experiences there, through the metaphorical process triggered by it, allows the child to establish connections between what is already there and the novelty that he or she creates, leading him or her to renounce the usual representation in order to (re)announce the relationship he or she establishes with the thing that came to meet him or her, whether in relation to Reggian spaces or in relation to verbal metaphor. Thus, we argue that Reggio spaces and literary texts, as well as art in general, are proposers of creative agency and potency for this metaphorical movement essential for the production of meaning, for aesthetic education, and for emancipation, and that, therefore, Reggiano's propositional space, literature, and art can—and should—be part of everyday school life, especially for children in early childhood education.