In the late 1960s, significant changes took place in Italian schooling. Breaking with the traditional approach to history, which involved lectures, textbook reading and questions, and basically required students to memorize the textbook content, new pedagogical practices based on active learning sought to engage students’ interest and develop their skills in the historical method. The Movimento di Cooperazione Educativa (MCE), inspired by popular pedagogy, promoted research-based history teaching and learning. Class sets of textbooks, filled with didactic research activities, were published to meet the need that this method posed. At the forefront of textbooks in this period were Antonio Brancati’s two-part volume published in 1965. These texts contained both the traditional narrative and extensive documents and historiographical materials that were remarkable for the time period and remained in print the rest of the century and beyond.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the MCE fought against traditional textbooks, rejecting both the methodological approach and content, which was primarily political with little social history. Academic historians also criticized the traditionalists’ approach as old fashioned and a “selective and teleological historicism, which conflicts with the historical authenticity of experience” (Cajani, 2006, 30). History education thus moved from systematic explanations on a macro level to an embrace of micro-history and a student-centred approach. The latter sought to motivate students as they could relate to topics such as family, school, gender, love, society, and so forth, rooted in contemporary history. While some called for the elimination of textbooks altogether, a more moderate position emerged that combined textbook use with classroom-based research, or history workshops (laboratory di storia), where students could learn the work of the historian. At this time, Italian teachers gained the freedom to develop the content, which was revolutionary and would come to transform the institution. As it was difficult for teachers to simply abandon traditional teaching practices and develop their own curriculum and didactic materials, in 1979 Remo Cesareni and Lidia de Federici developed elaborate textbooks for secondary schools that integrated exercises, activities, maps, written documents and other source materials to engage students.

Student-centred history education also came in the 1980s through the history workshop, typically included at the end of each chapter in history textbooks. These workshops emphasize concepts such as ‘causality and time’ or ‘duration and change’ in addition to traditional themes and activities to simulate the work of an historian. Antonio and Luciana Bresil, writing in the 1990s, created dynamic four park workshops to accompany textbooks. In these students move from deconstructing historical narrative, to their own research project, which involves document selection, interrogation, interpretation and writing of an historical text. In addition, history workshops provide the opportunity for students to reenact historical content while considering historical concepts such as memory, identity, and belonging. In spite of these innovative approaches to history education, secondary level history is still characteristically traditional, with evaluation tests at the end of each chapter. Although this is changing, the author suggests it will not happen quickly. With questions and concern about the absence of a commonly held national identity, mid-1990 politicians called for a review of Italian history textbooks. Public debate has ensued between those who see a Marxist orientation in Italian history textbooks and those who fear the politicization of classroom teaching. Italian history education is subject to change.