Invitation of Prof. Alessia Blad to campus in February 2015.
Prof. Alessia Blad leads the prodigiously successful Italian language program at the University of Notre Dame. She also teaches the Methodology course for the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures there. Among the innovations in which she has had a leadership role is the multi-university Consortium on Useful Assessment in Language and Humanities Education, of which Notre Dame is a founding member. This collaboration has produced a consistent set of tools for setting standards and assessing outcomes and that go from the lowest level of language to every level of literature and culture. She has been very active in curricular and extra-curricular initiatives, making the Italian language program the leading innovator in many advances later adopted by other programs (such as assessment, methods of teacher training, and most recently, computer enhanced language instruction, especially hybrid courses. She was invited by UC Berkeley recently for a similar presentation. She would spend one night in Ann Arbor in February, meeting with small groups of faculty and presenting to the entire Italian teaching staff, GSIs, Lecturers and Professors, on a Wednesday when elementary language classes are not held. She would consult and present on assessment strategies to connect lower and upper level courses, computer enhanced courses, and principles and practices of language pedagogy.