Italian Through Opera: Internalizing the music of poetry

Italian Through Opera: Internalizing the music of poetry

Grant:
Teaching with Technology Institute (TTI)
Academic Year:
2011 - 2012 (June 1, 2011 through May 31, 2012)
Funding Requested:
$2,500.00
Project Dates:
-
Applicant(s):
acorn
Overview of the Project:
The goal of this project was to make the internalization of the Italian language in its most sophisticated, powerful, and memorable forms a pleasurable conquest. To facilitate memorization of words to music and to reinforce familiarity with grammatical forms and vocabulary, several technology-assisted strategies have been developed: mp3 files with music slowed down without alteration of pitch.Quicktime videos that display key lyrics to music. lip-synched videos of themselves singing. (Photobooth)Sitemaker site for the libretto where students annotate the text for its grammatical, and poetic form, as well as for analysis of its literary meaning.
Final Report Fields
Project Objectives:
To find technological ways to facilitate internalization of the Italian language through close study and abundant memorization of opera
Project Achievements:
Close collaboration with the LRC on this course was immensely helpful. Although not all of the technologies we tried ended up being adopted by the students, I now have a whole range of possibilities for future iterations of this course, as well as other courses. The innovation that got the most use was the Sitemaker site that gave a centralized location where students listened to, studied, memorized, and annotated the libretto. Every class started with their own presentation of their own annotations, so that the focus really shifted from teacher to the students themselves. The slowed-down tracks may be very useful in the future with very fast arias, though they were not needed so much this time with the Traviata. The quicktime videos were very nifty, and a nice way to learn lyrics together with music, but laborious to produce and students did not seem drawn to them. The lip-synch videos were much more useful than I expected – an excellent way to see the students’ engagement with the language as they had to perform it.Opera is both highly literary – with its poetic form and often archaizing language – and also oral, dialogic, easily committed to memory, and always being performed around the world. Seeing how technology could help with comprehension as well as memorization has made me decide to develop the class at a lower-level, as one of the key “bridge” courses between the elementary track and the upper-level. I have discussed these various technologies with GSIs preparing to teach bridge courses next year. I also added several new technologically-assisted features to my large course on Dante in translation that I teach every year. Moreover, the departmental Curriculum Committee is planning a series of brown-bag sessions on pedogogical methods and ideas, at which I would be happy to share my experiences.Therefore, my TTI grant has had an impact on the Italian through Opera course, on the Dante course, on the curriculum in Italian, on GSI training, and on teaching ideas in the whole department of Romance Languages and Literatures.
Continuation:
As mentioned above, I will be offering the Italian Though Opera course at a lower, “bridge”, level in the Fall. I am also in consultation with LRC with how to apply some of what we did to my other upper-level literature class, which will have a focus on translation – in particular the Sitemaker site. I am even thinking about how to integrate memorization into such literary courses through the use of Audiobooks.
Dissemination:
As mentioned above, I have already disseminated techniques and technologies I’ve learned at TTI with GSIs, with colleages in RLL, and even with the participants of the 2012 Faculty Seminar on Translation.
Advice to your Colleagues:
Be flexible. If something doesn’t seem to be working, move on to something else. My team was incredibly generous in that respect as well.
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