Teaching history with the Reading like a historian curriculum

Abstract

This paper describes how the curriculum Reading like a historian, endorsed by the Stanford History Education Group, was used in the first two years of an Italian high school. It is an innovative study program, as it is based on an active approach to learning and aimed at developing some important skills that are typical of the work of the professional historian: in particular, the program focuses on the construction of answers to questions of investigation based on a critical analysis of the sources and their corroboration. Adopting this curriculum of studies in the Italian context necessarily stimulates the teacher to critically rethink the use of the history manual and the organization itself of its teaching.