Right after the Covid-19 lockdown, we identified the opportunity to structure an Erasmus project to allow Italian, German, and Greek students to reflect on events of the Second World War and build extracurricular historical research laboratories where students could be protagonists. The KA 210 “The Memory That Remains” project focused on experimenting with an innovative pedagogical approach to the study of contemporary history with two goals: to change the educational paradigm and teaching practice (disciplinary objective) through the valorization of the centrality of the student and the corporeal and relational dimension of the mind (pedagogical objective). To this end, emotional education activities, historical research laboratories, and digital output publishing tools were structured. Therefore, the importance of studying events not yet included in school textbooks, overcoming the “victory-defeat” logics, and, in particular, exploring the possibilities to overcome dichotomies: mind-body, individual-society. Eventually, the understanding of the “generative conflict” seen as an opening to a comparison between diversity was tested.
The crisis of the values that lie behind the birth of institutions like the UN, the so-called ”collapse of the West’, has led to radical changes. Taking on the growing need for the School to face global challenges, as a Project Group we have questioned how we could intervene in an international space: we started with an approach that, rather than considering students as passive recipients of lessons, was based on the constant valorization of their thought and sentiment. Our main aim was the daily construction of new knowledge and experiences, which could contribute to a new vision of present and future times. Relying on its decades-long experience, the Cagnazzi High School has shared with international partners a student-centered methodology, through activities that have also given the students the chance to work in groups and always share results at each step.