Rate My Professor Stefania Giamminuti

Dr Stefania Giamminuti serves as Senior Lecturer in Early Childhood Education within the School of Education at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia. A bilingual Italian-Australian early childhood educator and researcher with over two decades of international experience, she previously worked as an early childhood teacher across Italy, the USA, and Australia. Giamminuti earned her PhD with Distinction based on six months of immersive research in the renowned municipal infant-toddler centres and preschools of Reggio Emilia, Italy, including Nido Arcobaleno and Scuola Pablo Neruda. Her doctoral work culminated in the influential book Dancing with Reggio Emilia: Metaphors for Quality (Pademelon Press, 2013), which introduces concepts of 'local values' and 'connective values' to reconceptualize quality in early childhood education through metaphorical lenses.

Her research focuses on pedagogical documentation as a tool for professional learning and collective obligations, the Reggio Emilia approach, children's rights and images of childhood, aesthetic-ethical-political dimensions in early childhood research, and cultivating children's relations with soil and the more-than-human world. Notable publications include co-editing The Role of the Pedagogista in Reggio Emilia: Voices and Ideas for a Dialectic Educational Experience (Routledge, 2024) with colleagues from Reggio Children; "Pedagogical documentation and the refusal of method: troubling dogmas and inviting collective obligations" (Early Years, 2022); "Aesthetic-ethical-political movements in professional learning: encounters with feminist new materialisms and Reggio Emilia" (2021); and "Early Childhood Educators' Perspectives on Children's Rights" (The International Journal of Children's Rights, 2017). With over 236 citations on Google Scholar, her scholarship bridges theory, research, and practice. Giamminuti has received the Western Australian Institute for Educational Research (WAIER) Early Career Award (2010) and Book of the Year (Early Career) recognition (2014). She actively contributes through public lectures, research symposia like the REAIE Research Symposium, podcasts on education as a common good, and collaborative projects such as with the MLC Kindle community on animating soil relations.