A higher-education teacher since 2015, I have experience designing and coaching college courses suitable for the Italian, Romance languages, and liberal arts curricula, such as Elementary, Intermediate and Advanced Italian, fairy tales, Italian grammar and composition, Italian Cinema, and Language Pedagogy. I’ve taught traditional courses as well as fully online and hybrid courses (half online and half peer-to-peer instructions). The University of California, Los Angeles and Indiana University, Bloomington are among my past employers. I am also familiar with undergraduate and graduate seminars in research institutions, community colleges, and liberal arts colleges. Lastly, I have experience with Study Abroad programs in Italy, which I joined both as a student and as a teacher.
This page openly features a student-run website from one of my past courses, two applied-technology pedagogical projects with which I collaborated, and a workshop presentation with original course materials. To see my electronic Teaching Portfolio, please click here (the link is password sensitive). Feel free to get in touch to start a collaboration, a pedagogical project or research, or if you have any questions.
Talking Italian Politics Website
In the spring of 2020, my colleague Pantalea Mazzitello and I co-created an educational website for our course on Italian Politics while we were both teaching at Indiana University, Bloomington. The website is entirely in Italian and our students were in charge of content creation, both in terms of writing and images. While studying the history of Italian politics from the aftermath of WWII to the present day, our students also explored Italian popular culture through film, newpapers, memes, and web videos.
Project #1: Italian Online
Through the support of the UCLA Office of Instructional Development, Humanities Technology, and the Department of Italian, the Italian Online project aimed to design material for the Italian languages curriculum at UCLA. It was also the springboard to a multilingual switch in the UCLA learning management system. The project was directed by Elissa Tognozzi (Director of the Italian Language Program), Claire Lavagnino (Lecturer of Italian), and Thomas Garbelotti (Instructional Technology Manager). The main technologies in use were the Learning Glass and the website GoAnimate.
Project #2: Expanded Classroom
Under the direction of Kimberly Jansma, Senior Lecturer of French in the Department of French and Francophone Studies at UCLA, I compiled grammatical tests for the first college-level of Italian language instruction. The tests appear on the Expanded Classroom website, available to UCLA students, and they include multiple choice drills and fill-in-the-blanks. Expanded Classroom also features tests in French and Spanish.
Workshop presentation
In 2016, I participated in a workshop organized by the University of Southern California Department of French and Italian, and I shared an activity I had experimented with one of my Intermediate Italian classes. The presentation was entitled Mi piacerebbe camminare in Italia: Intercultural Approaches to Ecotourism in the Italian Language Classroom (see the link for original course material).
Viola Ardeni 