Multicultural Histories & Identities in Italy & USA

​​​​​Project summary:

• In this virtual exchange project, DePaul students worked with students from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore​​ in Brescia, Italy to identify contemporary Italian and American cultural perspectives on the migrant experience in the US and Italy.  Collaboratively, they analyzed, compared and contrasted the language, style, and tropes of select textual and visual sources in Italian and English. The students interacted online through an asynchronous bilingual homework assignment of word association, sentence completion and situation reaction based on the media source. They also reflected on the culture-specific attitudes, values and biases that emerged in the homework assignment. In a synchronous meeting students discussed the salient traits of the different cultural perspectives that emerged from two short stories and two films centered on the migrant experience in both Italy and the US.  
  
  

Project length:

• 5 weeks

Technology tools used:

• D2L
  
• VoiceThread
  
• Skype
  
• Google Hangouts 
• WhatsApp 
• GoogleDocs

Interaction Mode:

• Synchronous
• Asynchronous

Learning outcomes:

• Students learned to articulate more complex ideas in the target language, both orally and in writing (language acquisition).
• Student broadened their knowledge of Italian history, culture, and literature from Fascism to the present (content).
  
• Students refined their stylistic and rhetorical analysis skills to interpret journalistic, filmic, and literary sources (stylistic and rhetorical analysis).
• Students analyzed the topic of migration across Italian and American cultures through structured interactions with target culture students (intercultural knowledge and competence).

Reflection component:

• A self-evaluation survey measuring the students’ perceived progress in the GLE experience in terms of, for example, the following values and skills: cultural self-awareness, knowledge of cultural view frameworks, empathy, verbal and non verbal communication skills, curiosity (these are the values and skills of the AAC&U Intercultural Knowledge and Competence Value Rubric).

Faculty Feedback:

"H​​ighlights for me include witnessing students rise to the challenge of peer-reviewing each other’s work, seeing friendships form, and learning that two DePaul students who will study abroad in Italy in the Fall are making plans to visit their GLE partners in Brescia." ~Caterina Mongiat Farina

​"It was a unique opportunity for students to learn to understand and appreciate different opinions, cultures and beliefs and develop a deeper awareness of their own. Students gained crucial skills to collaborate fruitfully in an international team and formed new friendships." ~ Sonia Piotti​

CattolicaNews

• Brescia-Chicago, "Erasmus" a distanza

Caterina Mongiat Farina

Institution: DePaul University
Discipline: Modern Languages, Italian
Course name: Advanced Communication III

Sonia Piotti

Institution: Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
Discipline: English
Course name: Lingua inglese III