The HAEU educational programme "Searching and identifying European citizenship in the documents of the HAEU. From building post-war peace to the construction of today's Europe" explores the founding process of the European Union, with a focus on the topics of peace and European citizenship. Union, Peace, Citizenship are in fact linked to each other and must be perceived as a trinomial that best expresses the result to which the process of European integration has led.
The programme has several objectives:
- Transmitting the history of the European Union, from the first phases of European integration to the values on which the Union is founded, through different expressive languages (musical, theatrical, visual-manual, bodily).
- Helping the students in placing themselves in European history, exploring their cultural backgrounds and personal and family memories, to obtain a greater awareness of their belonging to a broader collective history.
- Developing awareness of the importance of the common European cultural heritage.

The activities are carried out through multidimensional and multisensory methods. Dialogue, music, manual and corporal activities, group work, and verbal and non-verbal expression encourage the exploration of oneself and others through the development of emotions and feelings. Learning through these methods and creative languages implies a constant interweaving of fields of experience, which makes learning certain concepts and passages of history more accessible to the students. Furthermore, use is made of oral history, a historical research methodology based on the production and use of oral sources, which opens new ways of working through narrative and memory, allowing an important dialogue between the history of the European Union and the personal stories of the students involved.
The preparatory activities carried out in class by the students before the visit were supported by the following didactical materials, provided by the HAEU Educational Programme team:
- Didactical sheets on the Ventotene Manifesto, the Historical Archives of the European Union, the European citizenship, and the Maastricht Treaty.
- Template or the narration of the story of a family object particularly significant for the students.
- Video interviews with the archivists of the HAEU, where they introduce the fonds of which they are responsible.

For the didactical activities proposed as part of this educational programme, the following historical sources preserved at the HAEU were used: ETUC-52, NDG-131, ME-2563, PE2-13988, PE5-19781, CES-11853, NDG-468, PE2-17965, INT631, JD-72, AEDE-295, CIFE/IT-519, CIFE/IT-367, JD-1346, ACA-50-I.2, PE2-36640, CM2/1972-118, CEAB 2-25, JPG-24, SP-106, INT954-A.1, AS-293, NDG-481, NDG-332, NDG-489, YFEC-8, BABE-36, BEUC-883, NDG-377, BEUC-415, NDG-163, BEUC-449, GA-8, NDG-316-I.10, GR-35