Abstract:

In the Geo-history teaching processes, it is possible to think about overcoming the problems that emerge, both at the level of legislation and in the teachers practices? Is it possible to structure complex devices, designed by the community in training, to rethink the organization and the didactics of the acted discipline?

This initial hypothesis was formulated and verified as part of a research-training course for teachers, carried out by some researchers in Didactics of two italian Universities with a network of seven schools. The project was conducted over a period of three years.

The basic idea was to collectively construct a vertical disciplinary curriculum, going beyond the habit of declaring topics or listing activities, but starting from the skills considered essential to develop students' geo-historical thinking.

Contextually, this curriculum must take charge of the European long-life competencies, according to the idea of Fishman and Dede (2016): the teaching and learning processes are developed following logics that are not only cognitive and cultural, but also intrapersonal and interpersonal.

The approach of the path, based on the methods of Collaborative Research (Desgagné, 1997; Lenoir, 2012), aims to overcome an idea of frontal in-service training, prescribing best practices, and not linked to the needs of the teacher and his/her class.

Indeed, the postulated change is considering the teacher as a didactic designer of meaningful situations (Laurillard, 2014; Rossi & Pentucci, 2021), suggesting operations to be carried out on geo-historical knowledge. In this way, students learn to assume perspectives and modes of reasoning specific to the History.

The result of the research, inspired by the criterion of “double verisimilitude” (Pentucci, 2018a), was two-fold: on the one hand, a framework to structure the disciplinary curriculum was developed, starting from the theories of Curriculum Studies (Flinders & Thornton, 2021). This artifact can replace community knowledge viewed as an aggregate of routinized pedagogical formats (Veyrunes, 2015) and it becomes a place for encounter, self-training, designing, and attributing meaning to disciplinary epistemologies (Doussot, 2020). On the other hand, a participatory research model has been developed, starting from practices and bringing out the knowledge involved, triggering positive transformations in the posture of teachers and activating strategies for professionalization (Pentucci, 2018b).

Keywords:

Curriculum, Learning Design, Geo-history, Professionalization, Teacher training.