Project Shiro

Celebrating the everyday.
Finding gratitude in the ordinary.

Project Shiro works alongside educators, making room to step back from the days spent with children and look at them again. Since 2024, that work has taken many forms — in-house sessions, group-wide learning, online courses, documentation booklets and exhibitions, event design and study visits — across settings in Japan and the UK.

A learning community grows out of two things held together: affection and attention for what is in front of you, and the conversation in which what you notice is shared. Neither works alone. And both ask for 間 — ma, the in-between, in space and in time, that lets you step back far enough to see the ordinary again. Between a parent and a child, within a team, across a group of settings, or across a whole community: the scale changes, the two things do not. Project Shiro makes that in-between.

What is Project Shiro?

The grace of an ordinary morning.
The aliveness of things still growing.
The lightness of not yet knowing.

白 (shiro - white) holds all three.
A colour of celebration across many cultures, and a quiet reminder that ordinary days are worth cherishing.

What is your favourite white?
How do you feel when you bring it to mind?

Rainbow makes Shiro

White, to me, is the overlapping of illuminated colours. Each child brings their own colour into their relationships. When those colours meet and overlap, they make white, a symbol of collaboration and shared knowledge.

Project Shiro supports educators to reconsider the meaning of materials and pedagogical documentation, and through that, to enrich the relationships children have with each other and with the world around them.

Within a setting. Across settings. Across a community.

The work so far, in order of widening reach.

Sumire IIKAWA

PhD Fellow (Reggio Childhood Studies) in Reggio Emilia.
Atelierista at a nursery in London.

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© Sumire IIKAWA | Project Shiro