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The Museum and history teaching

In the perspective of a more modern conception of using and safeguarding the cultural heritage, the Risorgimento and Resistance Museum recognises history teaching as a necessary service in its cultural policy. It is part of an increasingly broad project to safeguard and appreciate our history.

The Museum’s teaching project aims at analysing the nature of historic knowledge and identifying teaching and learning processes; the didactic section is a favoured means of bringing together school and museum and foresees a range of useful tools to provide active contact with the vast range of documents on show in the rooms of the Villa Guiccioli.

This section has various workshops and teaching itineraries aimed at building up cultural knowledge, skills and attitudes. The result is a complete, coherent education project based on historical artefacts which entails direct involvement of the students and provides teachers with ready-to-use tools, allowing them independence in running the selected course.

Workshops

The museum hosts much historic data related to war. This material is difficult for children to approach, as at their young age they do not yet have the concept of the temporal and feel naturally attracted to objects like swords and guns without being able to properly place them. The objects on display in the museum are presented by means of creative workshop tasks with the aim of communicating the possibility of resolving conflicts by peaceful methods.

Treasure hunt

After visiting the museum, the children are asked to complete a jig-saw puzzle reproducing an object in the museum and then to find it in the showcases.

Downing arms

After visiting the museum, the children are presented with scale reproductions of objects in recovered materials. After the children have used them as weapons, they are asked to dismantle them and reassemble them inventing completely different forms and uses from the previous ones.

Forget me not

After visiting the museum, the children have the chance to change an object that is familiar to them into an object of memory. The programmes are explained at previous meetings with the teachers. The activities are aimed at children from nursery school and the first level of primary school. Each visit and workshop activity is carried out in the presence of two staff members.

Active museum routes managed by the teacher

The activities involve students from middle school and secondary school.

The routes intended for educational use of the museum’s rich documentary material stimulate active contact with the wide range of resources.

The aim is to contribute to history teaching by placing the students in a position to carry out certain mental tasks typical of the expert, and to gain experience in how the facts of the past are reconstructed and given significance. The intention is to build the intellectual equipment, skills and operational abilities that are the basis of knowledge construction: from knowing to knowing how.

Teachers and educators are encouraged to use a direct approach to the documents, with the aid of simple but comprehensive tools (materials/guide of the “Il Museo per mano” series), which make them independent in conducting the type of visit they have chosen.

Primary school

Soldiers, weapons, uniforms: a history

Chronological route tracing the technological development of military equipment as a pretext for actively learning how to question the documents exhibited by the museum.

Lower middle school

Barricades in the city: Vicenza, 1848

Reconstruction of the places and people of the Vicenza Risorgimento at its exciting climax between March and June 1848 with various kinds of documents (written, illustrated, material). This period coincides with the expulsion of the Austrians and the brief experience of the people’s first free government.

The trumpet sounds: music of the Risorgimento

Knowledge of Vicenza music composed to celebrate historic events, within the more general context of national production, dedicated to the ideals, the events and the people of the Risorgimento, with piano recordings relating to the itinerary.

Secondary school

Vicenza in history. 1797-1945

Itinerary to discover the role played by Vicenza in national events from the fall of the Venetian Republic to the Second World War, using selected documents.

The trenches: the enemy, the enemy... a soldier like us

This didactic section is intended to reconstruct the atmosphere of life in the trenches, symbolising the experience common to millions of soldiers during the First World War, by guided observation of a selection of documents on display in the museum.

Workshops run by teaching staff

These allow the students to directly, simply and actively experience how a historic text is constructed drawing information from the documents.
They are able to observe and have direct contact with some original materials of the period taken from the museum archives. This is intended to help them see these as resources by way of a gradual process of recognition that culminates in the final construction of short historiographic descriptions by the children themselves.
The activity is preparatory to a short final visit to the room representing Vicenza in 1848, where the children will be able to recognise the objects on display and to appreciate why they are there.

Middle school

A documented 1848

In a face to face meeting with a selection of various kinds of document on Vicenza in 1848, the children are guided through an intellectual and practical experience consisting of simple classification, observation and deduction tasks that exploit the excitement of being able to closely observe and, where possible, to touch authentic documents.