Teaching European Integration in Italian Upper Secondary School

Abstract

An extensive study of the representations of Europe in history textbooks has been conducted with regards to Italian lower secondary school (Pingel 1994, 2000, 2003a, 2003b; Cajani 2003). These studies have included considerations upon the history of European integration, although this was not their exclusive topic. To date, however, few pieces of research have addressed how the history of European integration is dealt with in Italian textbooks for upper secondary school (Accardo, Baldocchi 2004; Challand 2009). The present paper examines how curricula and textbooks portray the integration process in upper secondary school. It focuses on the position they attribute to Italy in different phases and the extent to which they use recent findings of historiography.

Keywords

• textbooks
• European integration
• history education
• textbook studies
• upper secondary school