In The Department

Antonella Del Fattore-Olson wins TLC Professional Development Award!

The Texas Language Center recently announced its Professional Development Award recipients for 2012. These awards are made to instructors of languages other than English at UT who are seeking to develop new materials, courses, or methods for teaching their languages, or who may need to attend a conference or purchase materials in order to improve their teaching.

French & Italian's Distinguished Senior Lecturer Antonella Del Fattore-Olson received the award for her project entitled "Intensive Italian: Videos by, with, and for Students of Italian."

About her project:

Intensive Italian: Videos by, with, and for Students of Italian

"Videos, both educational and creative, proved to be a valuable tool in the new course ITL 601 C, first-year intensive Italian: not the videos found on YouTube via Google –most of them in English—but the ones made for, with, and specifically geared toward UT students of Italian.

"One of our biggest challenges as Italian professors is to keep up with the different changes of the contemporary Italian society and be able to communicate them to a new generation of students that expect information to be as CURRENT as they're used to through their social networks. In order to do this, it's crucial to create new videos that show what Italy is like now, and thus produce video content that is both engaging and educational, while involving the students from the Rome Study Program in the creative process."

-Antonella Del Fattore-Olson