Conference Program

This contribution presents Una Settimana al Museo (A Week at the Museum), an established educational initiative developed by the Civic Museums of Reggio Emilia, in which school classes temporarily relocate their learning environment within the museum's collections for an entire week. The project aligns with the emerging construct of Widespread Education and moves beyond the conventional logic of the school visit, proposing instead an immersive, co-designed educational experience in which the museum functions as an extended and shared learning environment, capable of fostering authentic dialogue across past, present, and future.

The extended timeframe of the experience proves particularly well-suited to the demands of citizenship education and democratic participation. Sustained immersion in the museum space allows students to engage with complex constructs — rights, identity, participation, responsibility, and democratic coexistence — exploring their plurality of meanings and their inherently problematic dimensions. Cultural heritage and museum artefacts serve as catalysts for reflection and dialogue, enabling a form of learning that connects historical understanding, personal experience, and contemporary context.

This approach resonates with the framework of Global Citizenship Education (GCED) as defined by UNESCO (2025), which emphasises the development of knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes that empower learners to act as responsible global citizens. Similarly, the European Declaration on Global Education to 2050 (GENE, 2022) calls for educational practices that nurture critical thinking, active participation, and a sense of shared responsibility across local and global dimensions. The initiative also aligns with the aims of Civic Education as established by Italian Law 92/2019 and elaborated in the Guidelines issued by the Ministry of Education and Merit (MIM) on 7 September 2024, which foreground the formation of conscious, participatory, and democratically engaged citizens.

The contribution focuses on the experience of lower secondary school classes at the Museo del Tricolore in Reggio Emilia — a symbolic site of Italian institutional history, where the Italian flag was born in 1797. In this context, historical heritage becomes an occasion to interrogate the meanings of citizenship and democracy, connecting collective memory with contemporary questions of rights and civic participation.

The proposed activities promote active and participatory learning. Through autonomous exploration of museum spaces, engagement with historical sources and documents, narrative construction, and structured collective discussion, students are involved in processes of inquiry and interpretation. Simulation activities and guided debate invite students to engage with questions of community life, practising listening, negotiation, and shared decision-making — competencies central to both GCED and civic education frameworks.

Observations gathered during the activities indicate that students tend to perceive the museum, following this experience, as a welcoming and meaningful space in which diverse modes of learning and participation become possible. The project demonstrates how the dialogue between school, cultural heritage, and local territory can contribute to building educational contexts oriented towards the formation of critically aware and democratically engaged citizens — positioning cultural heritage as a strategic educational resource for the twenty-first century.