Reggio Emilia is a city of 30,000 people in the Emilia Romagna region of northern Italy. Its municipal early childhood system has been recognized and acclaimed as one of the best systems of education in the world. The system has evolved a distinctive and innovative set of philosophical assumptions, curriculum and pedagogy, method of school organization, and design environments which, taken as a unified whole, is called the Reggio Emilia approach. This volume explores this approach and provides a forum in which noted Italian and North American educators and administrators explain its rationale and practice and demonstrate how its principles can be applied in classrooms in America and the rest of Europe. It should be of interest to early education teachers, education administrators and policy makers.