DESIGNING LEARNING

Art, Architecture, Creativity, and Pedagogy

04-10 October 2026 | Reggio Emilia, Italy

Remida - Creative Recycling Center in Reggio Emilia

Designing Learning is a week of art, architecture, creativity, and pedagogy in Reggio Emilia — for educators, school leaders, and designers reimagining the spaces where learning happens.

Part of Reggio Week
“Built environments are windows for ideas.”
— Vea Vecchi

As Vea Vecchi reminds us, built environments are always windows for ideas. Every space expresses an image of the learner and a vision of society itself.  

Some spaces silence us.
Others invite us to explore, collaborate, wonder, and belong.

In Reggio Emilia, schools and public environments are imagined as places that listen: spaces capable of generating encounters, relationships, and creativity. Here, pedagogy and architecture evolve in continuous dialogue.

Drawing on the Reggio Emilia approach, we invite you to explore the intersections of art, architecture, creativity, and pedagogy, examining how environments, materials, and artistic processes shape the ways we learn.

Throughout the week, we will move through ateliers, schools, public spaces, and cultural centers that reveal how pedagogy, architecture, and art can evolve in conversation with one another and how environments can become places of imagination, encounter, experimentation, and collective learning.

At a Glance

  • Dates

    04-10 October 2026

  • Location

    Reggio Emilia, Italy

  • Audience

    Educators, school leaders, Erasmus coordinators, architects/designers, museum and cultural practitioners, learning designers

  • Language

    English, with professional translation for selected visits from Italian to English

  • Group Size

    20 participants

  • Fee

    From €660

    Erasmus+ KA1 fundable

What if learning spaces could teach us how to see differently?

What if pedagogy, architecture, and art were not separate disciplines but parts of a single creative dialogue?

Rooted in the Reggio Emilia approach, in this program, we explore how environments shape learning, how creativity emerges in relation to space, and how pedagogy can become an act of design.

Throughout the week in Reggio Emilia and its surrounding province, we encounter schools, ateliers, public spaces, and cultural projects that invite us to rethink education not as the transmission of knowledge, but as a collective process of research, imagination, and relationship. Together, we will explore a single practice through three interconnected lenses: the atelier as research, space as the third educator, and pedagogy as design exploring how they together shape learning environments.

1.The Culture of Atelier

Art as a Way of Thinking and A Wider Italian Tradition of Creativity

In Reggio, art is not an addition to learning. It is a language for thinking, researching, and constructing knowledge. The atelier embodies this philosophy: a space where imagination, materials, and ideas converge. The atelierista, an artist working within education, bridges aesthetic exploration with pedagogical reflection, helping both children and adults to think with their hands, eyes, and hearts.

At the Loris Malaguzzi International Centre, we spend a day inside this practice working with materials, light, and provocations alongside experienced atelieristas, encountering the culture of atelier from the inside rather than as observers.

This way of thinking does not begin or end in Reggio Emilia but belongs to a wider Italian conversation about imagination, one in which playfulness was treated with the seriousness it deserves. Bruno Munari approached fantasia, invenzione, creatività, and immaginazione as essential tools for thought, accessible to everyone. Gianni Rodari treated imagination as something that belongs to everyone, a grammar of fantasy that anyone could learn to use.

We invite you to see creativity not as a talent reserved for a few, but as a fundamental human capacity and a way of engaging with the world. Through the culture of the atelier, we explore how artistic languages, experimentation, and imagination can become powerful tools for inquiry, reflection, and meaning-making.

NO WAY. THE HUNDRED IS THERE

The child is made of one hundred.

The child has a hundred languages, a hundred hands

a hundred thoughts, a hundred ways of thinking

of playing, of speaking.

A hundred always a hundred ways of listening

of marveling of loving a hundred joys

for singing and understanding a hundred worlds

to discover a hundred worlds to invent

a hundred worlds to dream.

The child has a hundred languages

(and a hundred hundred hundred more)

but they steal ninety-nine.

Loris Malaguzzi   (translated by Lella Gandini)

One poem, many voices. A shared reading of The Hundred Languages of Children by Loris Malaguzzi.

Our participants from around the world read The Hundred Languages of Children in their own mother tongues, celebrating the beauty of diversity, identity, and shared humanity.

2.Space as Third Educator

When Architecture Becomes Pedagogy

In the Reggio Emilia approach, space is understood as the “third educator”, an active participant in the learning process alongside children and adults. Environments are designed not simply for children, but with an image of the child in mind: curious, capable, social, and full of potential. Light, materials, transparency, nature, and beauty all become part of a language through which schools communicate values and possibilities. Rather than serving as a neutral backdrop, spaces communicate values and possibilities, shaping how learners move, interact, think, and construct knowledge together.

Through the lens of the hundred languages, we will explore learning environments that honour multiple ways of expressing, knowing, and understanding the world and how schools can become places of research, dialogue, experimentation, and belonging. Our school visits are accompanied by Alessandra Ferrari, pedagogical coordinator of the Bassa Reggiana school network, whose work brings together years of experience in the municipal preschools of Reggio Emilia with a deep engagement in outdoor education and nature pedagogy.


A central experience within this theme is our visit to REMIDA, Reggio Emilia’s creative recycling centre and one of the city’s most influential cultural projects. At REMIDA, discarded industrial materials are collected, curated, and transformed into invitations for imagination and inquiry. More than a recycling centre, REMIDA represents a different ethic of education: one grounded in sustainability, creativity, and the belief that value can emerge through relationships and reinterpretation. Here, materials are not passive objects but protagonists in the learning process, capable of provoking questions, stories, connections, and new forms of expression.

Across these encounters, we invite you to reflect on a simple but profound question: what does it mean to create learning environments where space, materials, and the world itself become active participants in education?

3. Pedagogy as Design‍ ‍

From Programmazione to Progettazione

If the environment is a creative act, so is teaching. The Reggio Approach draws a clear distinction between two Italian words: programmazione — the planning of learning in advance, with predetermined outcomes — and progettazione — a process of designing learning in dialogue with children, questions, materials, and emerging possibilities as a living and collective process.

Progettazione does not begin from the assumption that learning can be fully predicted or controlled. Instead, it understands education as a living process shaped through observation, interpretation, experimentation, and collective reflection. Teachers work not as transmitters of ready-made knowledge, but as researchers alongside learners — listening closely, documenting processes, and responding to the unexpected directions that inquiry can take.

To move from programmazione to progettazione is therefore not simply a methodological shift, but an ethical and political one. It requires trust in uncertainty, attentiveness to relationships, and a willingness to construct meaning together rather than deliver it from above. In this approach, curriculum emerges through encounters: between people, ideas, materials, spaces, and the wider world.

Throughout the course, participants explore how pedagogy itself can become a form of design, one that balances intention with openness, structure with improvisation, and care with experimentation. The question is not only what we teach, but how we create the conditions for thinking, participation, and shared discovery to become possible.

This is also what gives the Reggio Emilia approach its significance far beyond early childhood education. At its heart lies a broader civic vision: the belief that schools, cultural spaces, and communities should be designed around participation, dialogue, imagination, and the dignity of every human voice.

Who is this for?

In this program, we welcome everyone engaged in the design, creation, and care of learning environments and cultural spaces. It is open to educators across all levels, school leaders, pedagogistas and atelieristas, architects and designers, artists, librarians, museum and community-space professionals, researchers, policy makers, and cultural practitioners.

Whether you work with young children, adolescents, university students, or adults — in schools, museums, libraries, ateliers, universities, or public spaces — through our program, we invite you into a shared exploration of how creativity, pedagogy, and imagination can shape learning across contexts and disciplines.

At the heart of this week is the idea that educational transformation cannot be reduced to architecture, aesthetics, or flexible furniture alone. New environments do not automatically produce new forms of learning. As many educators and designers working in this field remind us, meaningful change requires a parallel transformation in culture, relationships, and professional practice.

Environments matter because they shape encounters, participation, autonomy, and ways of thinking but only when educators themselves develop new ways of observing, collaborating, listening, and designing learning together.

This is why in our programs, we approach educational design not as the creation of finished solutions, but as an ongoing process of experimentation and collective inquiry. We invite you to think beyond the question of what spaces should look like and instead ask: What kinds of relationships, interactions, and forms of learning do we want to make possible?

Across the week, we explore how schools and cultural spaces can prototype new practices in small, meaningful ways — through documentation, dialogue, interdisciplinary collaboration, and attention to how people actually work together. In this sense, educational design becomes less about implementing models and more about cultivating the conditions for change to emerge.

What is included?

Designed with Erasmus+ accredited schools in mind

Overview: What You Pay

Option 1: Base week‍ ‍

Course Fee‍ ‍€660

Participant Services and Cultural Program ‍ ‍€240

Total: €900

Option 2: Base week + atelier upgrade €1,010

Option 3: Base week + school visits €1,250

Option 4: Base + school visits + atelier upgrade

€1,360

The program unfolds across five days of school visits, ateliers, dialogues, co-design sessions, guided visits and shared meals.

Course fee: €660

Covers the five-day professional learning program, expert facilitation, preparation, materials, and certificate of participation.

  • Full participation in the program

  • Facilitation, interpretation, and pedagogical accompaniment throughout the week

  • One Day program at Loris Malaguzzi International Center

  • Visits to cultural projects and learning spaces, including REMIDA

  • Guided pedagogical encounters, visits to ateliers and learning spaces

The programme is intentionally designed as a small-group experience to allow for dialogue, reflection, and meaningful exchange among participants.

Participant services and cultural program (mandatory): €240

  • Participant welcome packet with schedule, readings, and practical information

  • Professional translation services from Italian to English

  • Course materials and collective documentation, including professional media package with videos and photos

  • Transportation within the programme when required

  • Welcome aperitivo on Sunday evening

  • Atelier on gastronomic traditions of Reggio Emilia

  • Closing celebration meal

  • Cultural program to choose among:

    • Visit to Parmigiano Reggiano Factory

    • Visit to Il Borgo del Balsamico (chosen as one of the best 100 products of Italy)

    • Half-Day Guided Tour in Modena or Parma

Optional Add-Ons

Two ways to deepen the week, chosen when you register.

  1. Atelier experience at the Loris Malaguzzi International Centre

    €110

    One full day visit to the Loris Malaguzzi International Centre is included in the base program. This optional add-on extends the experience with a hands-on atelier session led by the Centre’s atelieristas.

  2. A day inside two remarkable educational settings

    €350

    Participants spend the day visiting Scuola in Golena and Nido Iride — two deeply inspiring educational environments in the wider Reggio Emilia area.

    The experience includes pedagogical dialogue, translation, lunch, and transport, offering participants the opportunity to encounter educational practice not as theory, but as something lived daily through relationships, materials, spaces, and routines.

    Participants who do not choose this add-on join a parallel learning program included in the base week.

Not Included

  • Travel to and from Reggio Emilia

  • Accommodation

  • Other meals and personal expenses

  • Optional activities outside the programme schedule

Detailed practical information, accommodation suggestions, and travel guidance are shared with registered participants after confirmation.

What You Take Home

Learning is not something consumed and completed, but something carried forward, revisited, transformed, and shared with others.

This week is an encounter with ideas, schools, and pedagogical practices. It is also a process of making, reflecting, and designing.

Throughout the program, participants gradually develop a series of personal artefacts that translate observation into reflection, and reflection into future practice.

  • a personal statement that articulates how the ideas, encounters, and provocations of the week might influence one’s own educational, cultural, or creative work. Rather than a fixed methodology, it becomes a declaration of values, intentions, and possibilities.

  • A portable collection of materials, traces, sketches, notes, images, textures, and provocations gathered across the week. Inspired by the culture of the atelier, it serves both as a tactile memory of the experience and as a resource for future experimentation back home.

  • a curated collection of questions generated through dialogue, observation, and reflection. The aim is not to leave with ready-made answers, but with stronger questions: questions capable of continuing conversations, opening new lines of inquiry, and reshaping practice over time.

Any Questions? Contact Us!

PRE-REGISTRATION FORM

This form allows us to get to know you and your context as we curate the learning group for Designing Learning | Art, Architecture, Creativity, and Pedagogy.


Once submitted, we will reach out with confirmation and details about the next steps.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Still have questions? Take a look at the FAQ or reach out anytime. If you’re feeling ready, go ahead and apply.

  • Reggio Week is one professional learning week in Reggio Emilia, running two parallel programs side by side. The City as Atelier explores place-based learning and the city as a learning environment; Designing Learning explores the relationship between art, architecture, creativity, and pedagogy. Each participant chooses one journey and follows it across the week, while the two groups come together through shared sessions, meals, cultural visits, dialogues, and moments of reflection. So you are not choosing between three separate courses — you are choosing one of two journeys within the same week.

  • 04–10 October 2026, in Reggio Emilia, Italy. The week runs from Sunday arrival to Saturday departure, with five days of program in between.

  • We welcome everyone who designs, nurtures, or reimagines spaces of learning and culture — educators across all levels, school leaders, pedagogistas and atelieristas, architects and designers, artists, librarians, museum and community-space professionals, researchers, policy makers, and cultural practitioners. Whether you work with young children, adolescents, university students, or adults, the week invites you into a shared exploration of how creativity, pedagogy, and imagination can shape meaningful learning across contexts and disciplines.

  • Not in the official sense. Reggio Emilia is the place where this work was born, and the Reggio Approach is the rich soil from which many of the experiences and spaces we will visit have grown — so its influence runs through the week. But Reggio Children is the institution that holds the official Reggio Approach training, and if that is specifically what you are looking for, you will find their study groups and professional learning programs on the Reggio Children website. Our week takes a wider lens: it draws on the Reggio tradition while opening a panorama of perspectives on creativity, atelier practice, materials, place, and the design of learning environments — bringing together voices from education, architecture, art, and culture into a shared inquiry.

  • Read the descriptions of The City as Atelier and Designing Learning, then choose the journey that best fits your role, interests, and professional development goals. If you're unsure which is the better fit, contact us and we'll help you decide.

  • Both are possible. Individuals bring fresh and often unexpected perspectives, and if you join alone you will not feel it for long. We also warmly encourage teams, as the experience is enriched when schools, organizations, or design practices arrive with multiple voices. Coordinators planning a group — including Erasmus+ mobilities — will find a dedicated section for group registrations.

  • English throughout, structured as a co-design lab in which each participant is an active contributor. Professional Italian–English translation is provided for school visits and selected sessions.

  • Each program is limited to 20 participants — large enough for genuine diversity, small enough that no one disappears. The deliberately small size keeps ateliers, workshops, and guided visits close and the dialogue meaningful.

  • Complete the pre-registration form and tell us about your context, your role, and what brings you to Reggio Week. Because the groups are small and intentionally curated, we review each pre-registration carefully. Once your place is confirmed, you complete payment to reserve it — spots are limited to twenty per program. If your Erasmus+ grant has not yet been disbursed, contact us and we'll discuss a payment timeline that fits your institution's process.

  • We recommend booking flights and accommodation only once your place is confirmed and the cohort is finalised. We're happy to share recommendations on where to stay in Reggio Emilia.

  • No. The total amount you pay is the one shown in your registration form. We do not charge extra enrollment fees, deposits, or hidden costs.

  • The €660 course fee covers the five-day professional learning program, expert facilitation, preparation, materials, a full day at the Loris Malaguzzi International Centre, visits to cultural projects and learning spaces including REMIDA, and a certificate of participation. The mandatory €240 participant services and cultural program covers translation, transport within the program, the shared meals (welcome aperitivo, gastronomic atelier, closing celebration), course materials and media package, and a cultural visit. Optional add-ons are chosen separately at registration.

  • Once your place is confirmed, we send a booking confirmation with full payment instructions. Payment is made by bank transfer, and the bank details and the reference to include in your payment description are provided in that confirmation message. No payment is requested while a course is still pending confirmation — you only pay once your spot is secured. Once your transfer is complete, please email the confirmation to info@educademy-eu.com for our records. If your Erasmus+ grant has not yet been disbursed, contact us and we'll agree a payment timeline that fits your institution's process.

  • Cancellations must be notified to us by email at info@educademy-eu.com. If you cancel shortly after registering, statutory withdrawal rights may apply; in all cases, please contact us and we'll confirm how they apply to your booking. Because our group is small and many costs — translation, school visits, catering, and venues — are committed in advance, we ask you to let us know as early as possible. If something prevents you from attending, we will always look first for an alternative that works better than a refund:

    If neither option suits you, our refund terms are:

    • Cancellations notified more than 6 weeks before the start of the course: full refund, minus a €150 administrative fee.

    • Cancellations notified between 6 and 4 weeks before the start: refund of the course fee, minus the €150administrative fee and the €240 participant services and cultural program fee, which by this point is committed to translation, catering, and transport.

    • Cancellations notified less than 4 weeks before the start: the fee paid is retained, as our commitments to partners can no longer be recovered.

  • Educ@demy is not liable for costs arising from circumstances beyond our control — including travel disruption, illness, or decisions of public authorities. In the event of a cancellation required by an official authority (EU, national government, or National Agency), we will refund the course fee paid, minus a €150 administrative cost per participant. For this reason, we strongly recommend booking only flexible flights and accommodation, and arranging your own travel and health insurance, which is obligatory and at your own responsibility.

  • If we are unable to confirm a session — for example, if it does not reach the minimum number of participants — you will not be charged, and any payment already made is refunded in full. This is why we ask you to wait until your place is confirmed before booking flights and accommodation. Please note that Educ@demy cannot reimburse travel or accommodation costs in the event of a cancellation, so flexible bookings are always the safest choice.

  • Yes. All participants receive a Certificate of Participation, which may be applied toward professional development hours where applicable.

  • Travel to and from Reggio Emilia, accommodation, meals outside the shared program meals, and any optional activities outside the program schedule. Once your place is confirmed, we share recommendations on neighbourhoods, hotels, and travel routes.