ITAL is a storytelling project that was successfully implemented for six years at the University of Texas at Austin.
Click button to access old italchannel.tv site, which includes the feature film Tiramisu for Two and dozens of other video stories, such as the beloved documentary series Texan Italian Stories.
Scroll down to learn more about this project
ITAL CONNECTED STUDENTS WITH THE LOCAL ITALIAN DIASPORA, RENDERING THEIR LANGUAGE LEARNING MORE EXPERIENTIAL.
Here's some food for thought:
Why are we teaching college-level language classes in a vacuum?
For example, there are thousands of Italians in Texas and hundreds of thousands of Italian Americans in the same state;
How about we use that as the context to determine how Italian should be taught?
ITAL was a successful attempt to create a link between the Texan Italian community and the department of French and Italian at the University of Texas at Austin. The model relies on storytelling; it encourages students to become community storytellers, unearthing the stories of the community that uses their target language. This process helps students create new connections, and make learning more engaging, improving their language skills and transcultural literacy.
ITALCHANNEL.TV is a digital channel with hundreds of stories, some created by us and some by students. Through six years we told stories that were divided in four different types: News, Educational Videos, Documentary and Fiction.
While the News, Documentaries and Fiction content was open to the community and distributed through different channels, including YouTube and local movie theaters; Our educational videos were used by instructors in class along with pre-viewing, during viewing, and post-viewing exercises.
Watch a couple of examples below of some of the many stories inside italchannel.tv,
You can also just click here and explore the site at your leisure.
Explore the different stories of ITAL
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