Staff

"Learning and teaching should not stand on opposite banks and just watch the river flow by; instead, they should embark together on a journey down the water. Through an active reciprocal exchange, teaching can strengthen learning how to learn." -Loris Malaguzzi

​Overview
At Kuwait Reggio Center we are committed to helping teachers continually advance their knowledge and skills as educators. Not only do we offer in-house professional development, but we also send teachers to Reggio Emilia Italy so that they may be trained in the Reggio Emilia approach to learning. Each year staff members spend 2-3 weeks in Reggio Emilia to attend an international study group with educators from some of the top schools around the world. Our staff have a great deal of experience in early childhood education, and many hold advanced degrees from well known universities.
    Faculty members are carefully chosen and each one brings their special talents and passion to the learning environment at Kuwait Reggio Center. Teachers work closely with each other, the pedagogista, the atelierista and with families in order to create enriching experiences for their students. Each day, teachers spend time reviewing student work in order to assess each child’s development and individual needs. Teachers use what students have done, said, and created to plan how they will foster continued learning and growth for their students. Once a week teachers meet in a group with the pedagogista to share ideas and decide how they will adapt the curriculum to what is going on in the classroom.
The curriculum is not confined to a school year, but because of our unique looping system, projects and student inquiries can span multiple years. Teachers and students move together as a group to a new classroom each year. Teachers already know each student’s interests and abilities, and the children already feel comfortable and connected to one another. Learning and student progress begins right away as the start of every school year is a reunion instead of a review.

Pedagogista/Curriculum Coordinator
Kay Gowan has always been a teacher, whether making her childhood friends “play school” or organizing a summer camp for elementary students while she was still in high school. She discovered her passion for early childhood education during college while working with preschoolers in the Jumpstart program. After graduating from The George Washington University with her B.A., Kay started teaching kindergarten. Her experiences in the classroom inspired her to learn more, and she went on to earn her Master of Education degree with a concentration in Early Childhood Education from the College of New Jersey. It was here that she first learned about the progressive schools of Reggio Emilia. She worked to integrate these progressive ideas into the curriculum while working at the Universal American School and The American School of Kuwait. Now, the Kuwait Reggio Center is giving her the opportunity to create a fully emergent curriculum focused on student interests. Kay visited Reggio Emilia to study their approach in-depth, and uses what she learned there to inspire and inform Kuwait Reggio Center’s curriculum. 

​Nursery Director
​Cassidy brings with her many years of classroom experience and has focused her educational career learning about the Reggio Emilia approach. She has always enjoyed working with children and worked at summer camps while in middle and high school. While earning her B.A. from Suffolk University in Boston MA., she worked in Head Start pre-schools through the well-known AmeriCorps program Jumpstart. Her manager immediately noticed her professional ability as well as passion for teaching and chose her to be a team lead for the program. After moving to Kuwait in 2010, Cassidy worked for several years at The Universal American School in Hawally as a classroom teacher in Grade 1, KG1 and KG2. Cassidy earned her Master of Education degree with a focus in Early Childhood Education from The College Of New Jersey and has participated in international study groups in Reggio Emilia Italy. After taking some time off to have children of her own, she is very excited to get back to work at Kuwait Reggio Center.

Atelierista/Art and Project Coordinator
Charmaine Al-Mulaifi is a parent, artist and educator specializing in aesthetic education. She earned a BA degree in Art History with an emphasis in Early Childhood Education from the University of California, Santa Barbara. During this time she taught preschool, which sparked her enthusiasm for art education. After earning a Masters of Art in Decorative Arts and Design from Parsons School of Design, she spent several years as a freelance artist, holding classes and workshops with a concentration in printmaking and calligraphy. Charmaine believes in using drawing and painting, dance and movement, mixed media and music in her classroom to create a rich environment to inspire social collaboration and nurture learning.  

Our Environment

"We must widen the range of topics and goals, the types of situations we offer and their degree of structure, the kinds of resources and materials, and the possible interactions with things, peers, and adults." -Loris Malaguzzi

Overview
    Part of the Reggio Emilia philosophy is the belief that environment acts as a third teacher. What does this mean? How we set up a space of learning for children reflects what capabilities we believe the children possess, as well as the type of knowledge we hope they will gain. At Kuwait Reggio Center, we have taken care to make sure that our learning environment will foster safe exploration, peer communication and language development, promote problem solving skills and spark child curiosity. Teachers are constantly working with our Curriculum Coordinator and Art Director in order to adapt their classrooms so that the space invites children to deepen their knowledge of specific, age appropriate ideas and concepts. 
    Children are highly aware of their surroundings. The way a classroom is set up will not only affect how they interact with materials, but also how they interact with their peers. An environment that has a variety of community spaces, as well as carefully chosen materials available at a child’s level will encourage independence, confidence, peer discussion, problem solving and complex thinking.
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Classrooms
    Our classrooms are spacious, bright, and thoughtfully designed to promote student inquiry and meaningful social interactions. With only 12-15 students per class, each student receives plenty of one-on-one attention from teachers, has space to move around the room and plenty of access to all the materials. This freedom of access means there is less conflict between students and more opportunity for peer-lead learning. This in turn teaches students important social skills that they will use not only for the rest of their educational career, but also in the workplace and world at large. 
When entering a classroom at Kuwait Reggio Center, you will notice an abundance of materials including manipulatives, natural resources, clay, paint, dramatic play areas, materials for building, and much more. Our materials foster student inquiry and gross and fine motor development. Each classroom is constantly changing based on student interest and need. For example, the dramatic play area of the 2-3 year olds could be a house and kitchen in one classroom, while it might be set up as a pirate ship in another classroom. It will correlate with the lessons that particular class is learning and the things that students have shown a curiosity about. When students feel that their passions are valued they will move forward in their exploration of new concepts with confidence. 
The classrooms are also designed to take into consideration student ages and abilities. For example, the 1-2 year old classrooms offer a large amount of sensory objects. As children explore texture, sound, color, light and shape, they also learn how their bodies interact with the things around them and how those materials interact with each other.

Central Piazza and Playground
    Learning and exploration are not confined to individual classrooms. Children are offered daily time to play in the school piazza and the playground. Both of these areas allow students to interact with older and younger children from different classrooms. While teacher-student interaction is important, the well-known psychologist Vygotsky, also argues that social and cultural factors contribute to cognitive development. Children often value information more when it is being shared with them by other children or when they are working together to co-construct knowledge. Older children are encouraged to teach and help the younger ones, while the littles learn from and show confidence playing with older children. This allows older children to reinforce skills that they have learned, feel proud about the work that they have done, learn patience and challenge themselves to think from another person’s point of view. Younger students benefit by observing new things to try, improving speech and vocabulary, and feeling important due to the attention they receive from the older children.
    The Piazza is a large centrally located space inside the school that has been inspired by Kuwaiti culture and tradition. There are several spaces for intimate social interaction including a diwaniya style seating area, a dramatic play area, a building block area, a library nook and an indoor playground with soft equipment to help students advance their gross motor skills. The Piazza also has a project area that uses art supplies and recycled items to inspire children to think green and find new purposes for old materials through creation. In this area children learn about Kuwait’s climate and environment and how they can contribute to keeping our Earth clean.  
    The Playground at Kuwait Reggio Center is one of the largest in Kuwait. It consists of a custom-built jungle gym, a track for bikes, tricycles and scooters, a large sandbox, and a water-play area. It also has an expansive yard where children can run, play ball or create their own activities and games. Finally, it has a garden where children learn to grow vegetables that they will then harvest and use in their cooking classes.

Atelier
    In keeping with Reggio tradition, the Kuwait Reggio Center has its own art studio called the “atelier.”  Students go to the atelier in small groups to work with the art director or “atelierista.” The atelier has a wide variety of materials so that students are free to express themselves in any media or ‘language’ they choose. Students even help set up the studio so that they feel it is truly a space made for them. The “atelierista” or art director works closely with the classroom teachers and the school’s curriculum developer to set up the atelier in a way that encourages further exploration of the topics students are learning about in their classrooms. The atelier is constantly evolving to reflect children’s new ideas and understandings of these topics.  
    The projects in which students participate are different from your “typical” art projects. We are interested in the process rather than the finished product. In most schools students are given a model to copy. This produces uniformed artwork that does not require students to think creatively.  It serves only as a lesson in “following directions.” We encourage children to experiment with their own designs and inquiries using the diverse materials available in the atelier. Students are asked which materials they enjoy using, how they want to use those materials, and how they think their final products should be displayed for the entire community to enjoy.