The programme "Europe and Europeans 1950>2020: 70th anniversary of the Schuman Declaration" was dedicated to the Schuman Declaration on the occasion of its 70th anniversary. Starting from the exhibition celebrating the event set up by the Historical Archives of the European Union, the students reflected on themes such as solidarity, mobility and European citizenship. More generally, the programme aimed to make the new generations reflect on the meaning of being European through the study of the European integration process and the principles that inspired its creation. The students reflected together on the multitude of sectors in which the EU is engaged today and was engaged in the past in order to fully understand the meaning of the term "union". The programme also tried to highlight the challenges and complexities that the European Union faces on a daily basis.
The educational path was guided by the materials selected for the exhibition, the careful reading of which allowed to contextualize the specificities of the historical moment when the process of European integration started. The HAEU educators presented the different archival documents (documents, photos, posters, videos, films) to allow the participants to acquire skills useful for the analysis of the sources not only from a descriptive point of view, but also as concerns their interpretation through specific conceptual and historical connections.
The educational approach chosen for teaching the history of European integration made use of a great interdisciplinarity, giving space to an inclusive teaching with the aim of investigating and valorising the memories and narratives of the younger generations. The aim was to give the students the opportunity to grasp the connections between the different historical periods to give continuity to what the European Union was in the past, is in the present and will be in the future. The aim was to stimulate students to re-elaborate a complex event, such as the creation of the European Union, after reading the Schuman Declaration, in light of all the implications it had in the past as well as the repercussions in the present and the expectations for the future, including their perspective.
The project was divided into two meetings, during which the students investigated the meaning of the European Union starting from the documents used to set up the Schuman Declaration exhibition on the occasion of its 70th anniversary. The path was guided by the documents selected and preserved in the Archives, and the meetings were structured as follows: during a first meeting, the students had an initial approach to the text of the Schuman Declaration by reading it and analysing the document with the purpose of developing the idea of ​​"union", based on the intentions expressed in the historical period of the 1950s. With the guidance of the educators, the students proceeded to design a historical timeline, starting from the dates, names and events that they found on the panels of the exhibition. This exercise of placing events in history allowed the students to find their own space in the European Union as citizens and Europeans. To address the theme of the construction of European memory and what European citizenship is today, and as an exercise in the individual placement in the European history, students and teachers were asked to tell their own personal or family experience or to tell the story of a family object of their choice. The different stories produced served to convey their cultural origins, their family genealogy, the multiple possibilities of human mobility and the diversity of their cultural, local and transnational affiliations. This material was preparatory for the second meeting and could consist of a short text containing a brief presentation of the story to be told.
A second meeting focused on the stories of the students and on the European history with the aim of making this connection between the history of European integration and the personal history of each of them clear.
Furthermore, the students found themselves working directly on the panels of the exhibition to reflect on the idea of ​​"union" in its nuances of meaning and in its concretizations through short insights into important events and characters. The students elaborated the concepts of geographical union, union of rights, economic union and "de facto solidarity". The meeting ended with a personal reflection by the students on the topics covered that could take the form of a newspaper article, a video, a video or a panel expressing their feeling of "being European". An alternative activity aimed at students was the possibility of setting up directly at school the exhibition dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the Schuman declaration with the help of the HAEU educators