Translated from Italian by Bianca Bandini
Public history is particularly tied to the field of education, because educational contexts provide a natural setting for bringing together the transmission of cultural knowledge and the active involvement of learners in its interpretation. Here we focus on Italy, where the first conference of the Italian Association of Public History took place in 2017. This event marked a very important milestone in the field by creating a common ground for future initiatives.Footnote 1 In the years since, we have been observing both quantitative and qualitative growth of these initiatives, following three main lines of action:
1) Initiatives carried out with the local population and community resources. A cultural institution—a museum, library, archive, or university—may serve as the sole main actor, or it may partner with another institution. Some projects have even found an application for public history that far exceeds the field’s long-recognized potential—for instance, the use of public history as a tool for social mediation and conflict management. When we apply this approach to social minorities and marginalized groups, we find that it leads to genuine empowerment. Both individuals and communities gain a greater awareness of their own identity and life choices. Above all, we must emphasize that giving a voice to those who have been silenced in traditional historiography makes breaking down stereotypes and social stigma significantly easier.Footnote 2
2) Initiatives launched directly by teachers at various grade levels in order to improve teaching and make learning meaningful. Schools and university professors have used the public history approach to improve teaching by combining theoretical study with local and/or digital experiments. In the most successful cases, this approach to teaching—enhanced by public history—has helped build educational communities. Through this approach, students can finally step outside the four walls of the classroom and move beyond the exclusive teacher-student relationship to enter a network of social and cultural relationships in which local institutions and communities have participated.Footnote 3
It should be noted that history, understood in this way, has a cross-curricular educational value because it also increases awareness, critical thinking, and understanding of complex and global events in other disciplines. Consider, for example, how a cross-curricular approach could help address the major challenges of the contemporary world, primarily climate change, economic and social inequalities, the challenges of artificial intelligence, and the devastation of war.Footnote 4
3) Initiatives involving professions characterized by a strong relational and caregiving component, such as teaching, nursing, medicine, and social work. The third approach can be defined more precisely as an exercise in applied history that draws on a 2016 manifesto published by the Harvard Kennedy School, created to highlight the usefulness of historical knowledge in addressing geopolitical challenges.Footnote 5 If we extend this idea to the education sector, we can engage specialized audiences to illustrate the value of raising awareness of professional roles. Many workplace behaviors commonly perceived as natural, spontaneous, or self-evident are in fact historically and socially constructed, often through deeply rooted and persistent conventions, such as praising a very active child and criticizing one who is quiet in nursery school, or forcing primary school children to sit still all morning and punishing those who move too much.Footnote 6
In conclusion, we refer to the Manifesto on the Public History of Education, a collaboratively and publicly written document, organized into nine theses which, in their entirety, effectively summarize the potential of public history when applied to educational contexts. The lines of action suggested by the nine theses demonstrate the vitality and the practical usefulness of public history, both at the individual level (teachers, educators, researchers, students, and members of local communities) and at the institutional level (schools, universities, museums, archives, libraries, associations, and local authorities).
1) Public history is a great resource that belongs not only to historians, but to all who, whether they are experts or not, intend to use their own cultural knowledge in order to adopt public history’s communicative style, social commitment, and methods.
2) Looked at from this perspective, public history is based on social needs and tries to provide shared methods of co-constructing knowledge, moving away from its usual idea of simple divulgation, dissemination, and transmission.
3) In the educational and helping professions, public history’s purposes are to: underscore the link between university and community, starting with the best current practices adopted to date (even if they are not designated as “public history”); raise awareness of the long cultural and social process of constructing collective attitudes and behaviors, whose roots are deep and span many generations (e.g., adult-child relationships);Footnote 7 provide tools for a critical understanding of society, which can be used to alter and improve the work of teachers, in particular by orienting their relationships with students toward the “best interests of the child.”
4) Initiatives in the Public History of Education have a natural proximity to teaching and schooling. They can make an effective contribution to both the improvement of learning and the generation of cultural changes within the local community.
5) Public history within the educational and helping professions can be used as a powerful tool for training, both at the initial stage and the in-service learning stage.
6) Public history activities favor direct contact and involvement with the people, but at the same time they work with communication and digital interaction technologies, doing so in the name of glocalism and social empowerment. From a technological point of view, this means employing open-source software, following open-access communication policies, and adopting the principles of open science.
7) Schools, museums, archives, libraries, and local authorities are the natural interlocutors for public history initiatives.
8) Historical research and teaching offer many opportunities and ways to build effective and engaging public history initiatives. However, we must underscore the special role played by oral history practices, life stories, and autobiographies.
9) Regarding the promotion and transmission of cultural heritage, public history has a privileged relationship with the community and its land.Footnote 8
