TI15: Italian + Stem

Workshops – Biographies

The Teaching Italian Symposium was held in person on Friday, October 21, 2022. Montclair State hosted the on campus workshops, maintaining the quality and excellence you have come to expect from this professional development program for K-12 and higher ed professionals.

The 2022 program, Italian + STEM, showed how science, technology, engineering, and math topics can serve as the content and discussion framework for Italian classes. Bill Rivers of the Joint National Committee for Languages of the National Council for Language and International Studies has stated:

“America’s STEM industries depend on the language industry. The work of traditional STEM businesses is now inevitably global; advances hardly occur in just one country or market. Multilingual communication is intrinsic to today’s scientific collaboration and progress, which means the language industry is fundamental to furthering every aspect of STEM professions and business. STEM companies in numerous sectors depend on the professional language industry to access more than $1.5 trillion in overseas markets.”

Teachers can tap into this burgeoning market and provide opportunities for students to hone both linguistic and transversal skills they will need to compete in a global community. The earlier students are able to explore the intersection of language and STEM, the more they will understand the purpose of language learning in their everyday lives and goals.

We are excited to have experts in world languages participate in the panel and lead workshops.

Workshops

This workshop aims at presenting the teaching potential of the YouTube channel Italian Innovators for Italian language and culture courses. Starting from hands-on experience, as content creator and associate professor of Italian at Villanova (as well as former director of the program), activities will be introduced based on the show’s episodes, modeling examples to different levels (beginning, intermediate, advanced) and age groups. The workshop proposes the YouTube pedagogy of Italian Innovators as a creative platform to develop new teaching strategies for brainstorming sessions, development of elementary phrasing, independent research online, teaching Italian history, converting information into content, and storytelling in the target language. LEVEL: Middle/High School, AP Italian, Higher Education (Presenter: Luca Cottini)

Workshop materials: Cottini

This session will show how science, technology, engineering, and math topics can serve as the content and discussion framework for world language classes. Research shows that students learn language best when engaged in hands-on activity. Content-based language teaching simultaneously promotes language acquisition and advances content knowledge. By selecting STEM topics, world language teachers can foster language learning by engaging students in important, real-world projects, while having students utilize their second language knowledge, skills, and abilities to complete the work. Project-based learning integrates all four language skills (listening, reading, speaking, and writing), incorporates collaborative teamwork, and challenges learners to use the target language in different capacities inside and outside the classroom. LEVEL: Elementary School, Middle School (Presenter: Nathan Lutz)

Resources available at www.nathanlutz.org

Challenged by coherence and organization of use of technology and digital tools? This new approach keeps students at the center of the learning endeavor. You will complete a technology use inventory before learning how to design a digital platform to cultivate proficiency and to prepare for proficiency tests (APPL, MOPI, STAMP, National WL Exams).
Google Form will be used for a technology inventory that will survey participants present use of technology tools, websites, learning platforms, and use of instructional practices aimed at students’ proficiency. The results will be displayed and will help inform the workshop presentation and discussion. Additionally, the results will serve as a springboard for the three sections of the presentation; the case for designing a digital platform for student centered learning, the organization of a digital platform that encourages and effectively furthers student proficiency and cutting edge use of digital tools that further the three modes of communication and the four language modalities within your newly designed digital platform.
LEVEL: Elementary School, Middle School, High School, AP Italian, Higher Education (Presenter: Karen Murano)

This workshop aims to rethink the hierarchy between STEM and language learning, often seen as subservient to science. While it is helpful to explore how language learning can improve students’ science skills, we also need to find ways to enhance the synergy of STEM and language learning skills to make our students better critical thinkers and more responsible world citizens.
The workshop will explore ways to balance, harmonize and synergize STEM and language skills, ensuring transformative learning across disciplines and acknowledging their specific cultural contexts. Building on the existing practice and knowledge of the participants, we will collectively design new activities that can stimulate skills synergy and cross-disciplinary connections. The aims are multiple. It is only one of them to take away a shared wealth of ideas for the classroom. The most important is to support a shift of perspective in our students in understanding that they don’t need to choose on one side of the line. They don’t have to turn their back on a passion, whether stem or language. They can love both and pursue them equally. LEVEL: AP Italian, Higher Education (Presenters: Tania Convertini and Giorgio Alberti)

Workshop Materials: Convertini-Alberti-1; Convertini-Alberti-Dalla Maiella al Tirolo

Biographies

Luca Cottini is Associate Professor at Villanova University and host & creator of the YouTube show Italian Innovators. He holds a PhD from Harvard University, a MA from the University of Notre Dame, and a BA from the University of Milan. He was trained as a classical philologist in Italy, and a cultural historian in US. His interests touch upon Italian literature, visual arts, and intellectual history of the 19th and 20th centuries, and on the birth Italian industrial culture, adverting, and design. His books include a monograph on Calvino (I passaggi obbligati di Italo Calvino, 2017) and a cultural history of the origins of Italian design (The Art of Objects. The Birth of Italian Industrial Culture, 1878-1928). His YouTube work explores the Italian model of entrepreneurship and innovation through cultural profiles, interviews, and lessons across different disciplines (fashion, food, technology, sports, music, engineering).

Tania Convertini is Research Assistant Professor of Italian language and culture at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire where he also directs the Italian language program. Her research areas include language pedagogy and digital pedagogy, as well as media studies and intercultural education. She has published articles on the pedagogical use of film and technology in the language classroom, and study abroad best practices. Her current project explores the work of the Italian educator, humanist and television host Alberto Manzi and the role of Italian educational television in the 1960s.

Giorgio Alberti is a Senior lecturer in Italian at the Department of French and Italian at Dartmouth College since 2016. In 2015 he was the Lauro de Bosis Fellow at Harvard University. His research areas include language pedagogy, as well as sociology of culture, especially the question of cultural transfer. He has published on cultural middlemen and literary agents, and his current project explores the processes of reception and legitimation of Italian poetry in the USA after 1945.

Nathan Lutz is the Co-Chair of the World Languages Department (for Junior Pre-K through grade 8) and a middle school French teacher at Kent Place School, an independent school for girls in Summit, New Jersey. Nathan previously served as Interim Director of the Primary School, Hybrid Learning Coordinator, Global Learning Coordinator, and Primary School French Teacher. Nathan holds a B.A. in French, English, and Women’s and Gender Studies from Louisiana State, an M.A. in French from Rutgers and an M.Ed. in Teaching and Learning from SUNY Empire State. Nathan is a tireless advocate for quality world language programs and was Chair of the NECTFL in 2020, VP of Programs for FLENJ, and President of the National Network for Early Language Learning (NNELL). Nathan was a 2007 NYSAFLT Leaders of Tomorrow fellow, a 2012 UPenn STARTALK Excellence in Leadership fellow, and a 2014 NECTFL Mead Leadership fellow. His most recent publication is Language Together: French (2018).

Karen Murano is a teacher of Italian and Spanish who has served as a Connecticut public school teacher, levels K-12, for more than 26 years. She is an expert in curriculum, instruction, and assessment, developing curriculum, and most recently, designing and developing rigorous real-world Italian curriculum and assessment aligned with the five AP Italian Units of Study. In addition to her passion for teaching and learning, outside the classroom, she am a leader in the state World Language community, serving on various committees as part of the Connecticut Organization of Language Teachers.
In addition to her BA in Photojournalism from Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester (NY), and double major in Spanish and Education from Nazareth College of Rochester, she also earned an M.A. in Spanish and an M.A in Italian and Mediterranean Studies at Middlebury College of Vermont. In 2016, she graduated from the University of Connecticut, Stamford, Administrator Preparation Program, UCAPP with a Sixth-Year Degree in Educational Leadership, Administration and Evaluation.