About Our Fifth Issue
The fifth issue of CANAL presents work created in the virtual context of the 2020-2021 academic year. It features essays written in both Spanish and Italian and presents two language-learning activities in Portuguese that were designed for the online courses taught in our department. We are proud to present a video detailing a student's involvement with the creation of open resource courses in Italian and, also, an essay from a recent graduate describing the professional possibilities that can open up for students who elect to complete an Honors Thesis.
Darnnellyz Batista’s “El fantasma de la memoria,” Naomi Carvajal’s “‘Hombre pequeñito’: La subjetividad feminina y el machismo,” and Alexis Mejía’s “El amor amenazado por la muerte” are essays that originated within Daniel Arroyo-Rodríguez’s “Advanced Spanish Composition” and “Introduction to Literary Analysis” courses. They discuss questions of trauma and historical memory in the context of the Spanish Civil War (Batista), reflect on the persistence of sexist gender roles using a poem from 1919 (Carvajal), and raise questions about the ephemerality of life and love using two poems from the Spanish oral romance tradition (Mejía).
Joseph Eluszkievicz’s “L’amicizia in Due di due di Andrea de Carlo,” which analyzes the concept of friendship in Andrea De Carlo’s Due di Due, was created within Giulia Po DeLisle’s Directed Study course in Italian literature. Valeria D’Arace’s “La bomba che unisce” investigates a short story by Clara Sereni and was written within Giulia Po DeLisle’s Italian Women Writers course.
Francesco Bruni’s film Tutto Quello Che Vuoi is the subject of three texts written by Vincenzo Coppola, Valeria D’Arace, and Anthony Sorrentino. Each was written within Fabiana Viglione’s “Italian Language and Culture Through Films” course.
Sara Realejo’s “Reflections on Multimedia Language Learning” and the activities within “Meme Creation as a Tool for Student Engagement” are from the Portuguese courses of Diana Gomes Simoes. They show how online tools (and online culture) are being used within her virtual classes.
“El multilingüismo y sus posibilidades profesionales,” by Jenna Millette, is a reflection on her experience writing an Honors Thesis directed by Max Ubelaker Andrade. It describes how the project deepened the connections between her work as a bilingual educator and her research in psycholinguistics, while also pointing her in the direction of new professional possibilities.
Andreas George's "Reimagining Italian Courses with Open Resources" is the product of a capstone project in which he worked with Giulia Po DeLisle and Fabiana Viglione to redesign two Italian courses without a textbook. Creating courses with open resources is one of the ways that our department is working hard to create high-quality experiences for students while reducing the cost of learning a language. In this video presentation, he describes the project, its challenges, and their innovative solutions.
As faculty members of the Department of World Languages & Cultures, and as the editors of CANAL, we are grateful for the hard work of this year’s contributors and for the mentorship and guidance offered by their professors.
Sincerely,
The Editors
Max Ubelaker Andrade
Giulia Po DeLisle