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U N I V E R S I T Y O F P I T T S B U R G H |
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Volume VIII, Number 1 |
September 2002 |
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U N I V E R S I T Y O F P I T T S B U R G H |
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Volume VIII, Number 1 |
September 2002 |
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Bellet Teaching Awards A driving enthusiasm for
her field guided Francesca Savoia, Department of French and Italian
Languages and Literatures, through her undergraduate career at the Università
degli Studi di Genova in Italy, her graduate work at UCLA, and finally
to her position at the University of Pittsburgh. “I have always been
passionate about my discipline,” she says. Savoia’s zeal for Italian
language and literature, in turn, fuels her interest in teaching undergraduate
and graduate students: “To me, it is fundamental that my students understand
how important what I teach is to me.” Savoia believes that a teacher’s passion and energy in the classroom can be contagious and help to inspire student engagement. “Communicating enthusiasm for your subject and for learning,” she argues, “is paramount; it is perhaps the most important ingredient of all.” Savoia asserts that this sense of gusto “is what prompts students to ask themselves what is their passion, what matters to them, and hopefully triggers their intellectual curiosity and their interest in Italian.” She recognizes, however, that her energy and dynamism can only go so far. “Competence, rigorous preparation, clarity, seriousness of purpose, good organizational skills, respect for and attention to students’ needs, high standards, fairness of judgment, and making yourself available,” Savoia points out, “are all very important.” A key way Savoia helps her students to “navigate” Italian culture, from the late Renaissance to the twentieth century, is by adopting a methodological theme, often linking course content to current social and political debates. “Recently,” she says, “in my Italian civilization course, I focused on the issue of social, national, racial, and gender stereotyping by presenting to the students texts that are directly or indirectly reflective of it.” Some of the selected texts included Primo Levi’s account of his experience in Auschwitz as an Italian Jew, and Commedia dell’Arte plays, which present stock characters that supposedly summed up the whole of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Italian society. In class, Savoia experiments with a variety of teaching
techniques: “The lectures in my civilization courses are almost always
accompanied by slide presentations, video clips, or transparencies.
Two or more classes per semester may be entirely devoted to the viewing
of a documentary, a movie, a play, an opera, or portions of them.” Collaborative
learning also figures prominently. “Typically,” she says, “students
are asked to form groups of five or more and discuss among themselves
the items listed in the handouts or any issue pertaining to the reading
and subject at hand, while I go around, listen, and intervene in group
discussion as appropriate.” Savoia continues, “Major issues, contentious
points, or commonly raised questions are then addressed by the class
as a whole, with my mediation.” | |||||||||||||
| A newsletter devoted to the support of teaching and learning at the University of Pittsburgh |
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