On Thursday, April 4^th UConn Early College Experience, and the UConn ECE Faculty Coordinator from Italian, Prof. Tina Chiapetta Miller met with a group of 10 UConn ECE certified Italian Instructors for their annual professional development workshop.

After opening remarks and an announcement of the multimedia content winners, the group heard from, UConn current PhD candidate, Danielle Pieratti on “"Traduttore / Traditore? Translation Pedagogies for ECE Italian".

Danielle Pieratti is an educator, poet, translator, and PhD candidate at the University of Connecticut. She has taught in secondary and post-secondary settings for more than twenty years. She is the author most recently of Approximate Body (Carnegie Mellon University Press 2023), and her first book, Fugitives (Lost Horse Press 2016), won the 2017 Connecticut Book Award for poetry. Transparencies, her translated volume of works by Italian poet Maria Borio, was released by World Poetry Books in 2022. She currently serves as poetry editor for the international literary journal Asymptote, and her latest manuscript is a collection of hybrid works inspired by translations of Dante's Purgatorio.

*Image is San Girolamo nello studio, c. 1475, di Antonello da Messina (1430-1479)

UConn Italian courses offered through ECE

On Thursday, March 9th UConn Early College Experience, and the UConn ECE Faculty Coordinator from Italian, Prof. Tina Chiappetta-Miller met with certified ECE Italian Instructors for their annual professional development conference.

After welcoming remarks by UConn Early College Experience Director, Christopher Todd, the group discussed their courses and ideas for student events with the faculty, and ECE Assistant Director Jessica Dunn. Later the group heard a presentation by Melina Masterson, Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies at UMass Amherst (and a graduate of UConn's ILCS Ph.D. program) who has recently co-authored and published an OER text of Italian called Tutt* a tavola!. She spoke about the experience of writing the text, what it has to offer, and why OER is important.

UConn Italian courses offered through Early College Experience.

On Friday, April 1^st,  UConn Early College Experience, and the UConn ECE Faculty Coordinator for Italian, Dr. Tina Chiappetta-Miller met with certified Italian Instructors for their annual professional development conference.

The day included:

• Remarks by Gina Gallo (Bristol Central High School) speaking about her experience in the Ph.D. program at UConn.
• Special Guest Speaker: Anna Marra, Ph.D., Lecturer in Classics, Humanities and Italian Studies at the University of New Hampshire: "Or ti riman, lettor, sovra 'l tuo banco: In dialogue with Dante"
• Instructor resource and activity sharing

UConn Italian courses offered through Early College Experience.

On Wednesday, March 24^th, UConn Early College Experience and UConn ECE Faculty Coordinator for Italian and Assistant Professor in Residence Tina Chiappetta-Miller met with ECE Italian Instructors for their annual professional development conference.

The group met to discuss teaching during COVID-19 and their best strategies and resources. Later, Assistant Professor Camilla Zamboni from Wesleyan University shared her talk “Teaching Italian through Games: Practical Approaches for a Gameful Pedagogy” with the Instructors.

Each Instructor received a copy of the board game Dixit. The game is based on picture cards that the players use words and expressions in the target language (in this case Italian) to describe in a cooperative and story-building ways. Prof. Zamboni discussed how to adapt games like Dixit to the Italian classroom (as well as provide a few online options) and why games can work as great teaching tools.

UConn ECE Italian courses offered through ECE.