Event

If you teach Italian and you love art, join us Friday October 23, 12-4:30pm, to discover how you can use art in your Italian classroom or Italian in your art classroom. 

Variations on Leonardo's Mona Lisa (L’arte con Matì e Dadà, http://www.matidada.rai.it)

This seminar is offered to K-12 teachers in existing Italian programs as well as to individuals and schools that may be interested in establishing a new Italian program. It will lead K-12 teachers of Italian on an exploration of the use of art, from drawing to painting, sculpture, and photography a) to introduce students to the study of the Italian language and culture; b) to introduce or reinforce specific grammar structures, communicative situations, and cultural themes, with work aimed at developing all four language skills – listening, speaking, reading, writing - at different levels. The seminar provides Act 48 credits in Pennsylvania.

The seminar is structured in a series of presentation by experienced University of Pennsylvania faculty and invited speakers. A light lunch will be served during the presentations.

Program:

12:00 General introductions and light lunch

12:15 WordPress: Technology and Art – Samantha Kannegiser, University of Pennsylvania

Samantha Kannegiser will introduce the web software WordPress, a great tool to create blogs, websites or apps that can find great applications in the language and culture classroom at different levels and for a great range of activities. The presentation will constitute a sampling of greater things to come in the "Italian through Science and Technology" seminar that we are planning for spring 2016.

12:45 My Still Life/ La mia natura morta – Lillyrose Veneziano Broccia, University of Pennsylvania

This presentation will demonstrate how students can compose their own Still Life, or "Natura morta" images, to capture who they are, and who they are becoming, in their study of Italian Language and Culture.  These images are then revisited in various ways during the semester to track how students (and their Italian lives) are transforming.  Students are asked to consider the genre itself, write “artists’ statements”, and engage in various kinds of discussion with their peers (both inside and outside the classroom) while making meaningful connections between their Italian studies and their own lives.  Besides their validity for vocabulary building and the acquisition of communicative structure in Italian, these activities stimulate ongoing self-reflection, inspire creativity, and encourage significant community-building dialogues that go beyond the limits of the lesson plan and help students develop an understanding of the endless possibilities for building relationships between life, art, language, and culture. 

1:15 A New Italian Language Workbook for Art Lovers, Stellare: Learning Italian with Cultural Stars – Diana Silverman, Fashion Institute of Technology of The State University of New York 

This talk will present a fun new art-based Italian workbook, with language exercises in the form of fascinating cultural experiences.  Entitled, Stellare: Learning Italian with Cultural Stars, the book enables students to study Italian nouns and verbs through activities that integrally incorporate, for example, paintings from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. While While the focus of today's seminar is on the visual arts, activities and exercises in the book include photography, music, cinema, and even the culinary arts.

All the profits from the book are assigned to fund medical care for refugees in Sicily.

https://sites.google.com/a/caa.columbia.edu/diana/

https://dianacsilverman.atavist.com/stellare-learning-italian-with-cultural-stars

1:45 From Paintings to Paragraphs: Encouraging Students to Discuss the Effects of a Favorite Work of Art – Helen McFie-Simone, University of Pennsylvania

Can students in first year Italian write at any length about a particular painting or sculpture?  How do teachers of the language who have little background in Art History help students to appreciate a particular work of art and describe their reaction to it?

This presentation will show how students at the elementary level learn to write about the effect of a work of art, either a painting or a sculpture, on the viewer, be he or she knowledgeable about Art History or not. After reading the very emotional and moving paragraph in a literary work, which describes a viewer’s reaction to a small painting in the Louvre (which seemed insignificant to her companion), students are encouraged to do a little research into Italian artists, to find a painting or a sculpture which is particularly appealing to them and then to write a paragraph about their own reaction to the painting and the emotions and memories it evokes.  Teachers can assist in the process by providing a list of artists whom they feel will provoke an interesting and moving reaction. The paragraph students have read in the literary work serves as a model for their own writing and encourages them to be uninhibited in their appreciation of the work of art they have chosen to write about.

The written exercise can subsequently become an oral presentation to the rest of the class, thus multiplying exponentially the students’ experience of Italian art. In this way not only do students learn to write better, they are also more knowledgeable about the rich patrimony of the Italian peninsula.

2:15 Italian at the Museum – Anna Mecugni, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Have you ever thought of an art museum as an exciting place for your students to learn and practice Italian by looking at and talking about a work of Italian art, in the physical presence of the actual object?

 Anna Mecugni, a curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and an experienced language teacher, will will explain why this is an experience worth pursuing, even if you do not have any background in Italian art history, or art history in general. She will offer some essential tools to invite and prepare participants to take students to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for a class or a series of classes. Taking as model a 1964 “mirror painting” by Turinese artist Michelangelo Pistoletto (b. 1933), Persona appoggiata, she will show how a work of Italian art can be used as a common platform with meaningful cultural content to generate activities that stimulate both language and culture acquisition in new fun ways.

2:45 Coffee break

3:00 Workshop - New! Book artist Angela Lorenz will lead the workshop at the Education Commons where she will be exhibiting a recent work, Victorious Secret, as part of the 2015-2016 Penn Humanities Forum. She will discuss the importance of manipulation and creativity in the language classroom and will present her work, particularly her forthcoming graphic novel, as point of departure for simple and creative language exercises.

4:00 Jesse Berg, author of Visual Leap (2015), will give a brief presentation of his book and discuss strategies for visual learners in the language classroom. Copies of his book will be available for purchase.

Parking around Penn: click here for parking availability.

This seminar is supported by the Italian Ministry of Education through the Consulate General of Italy in Philadelphia and is part of Ciao Philadelphia 2015, celebrating October as Italian Culture Month