Inserra Opportunities for Students
The Inserra Chair is committed to providing opportunities to Montclair State University and high school students for the acquisition and application of knowledge about Italian culture through ad hoc projects and regular programs in line with a current philosophy adopted in the education system.
The Inserra Chair spearheads, supports, and supervises special projects in collaboration with outside partners such as media, theaters, film productions private businesses, foreign universities, consular offices and titling agencies. These educational activities create pre-professional opportunities for students as integrated components of the regular course curriculum, which have a long-term effect on student success.
Reawakening of the Gods: An International Collaborative Project
The musical “The Reawakening of the Gods” is the core and engine of an international collaboration between Montclair State University (Inserra Chair in Italian and Italian American Studies, Musical Theatre Program, the John J. Cali School of Music) and Savatteri Produzioni, a musical theater company based in Italy (Agrigento, Sicily), including workshops, internships, meetings, performances and classes.
Internships and Scholarships
The Inserra Chair, in collaboration with the Italian Program in Global Cultural Studies, has offered a vast array of pre-professional opportunities and scholarships to students of Italian at Montclair.
Italian for Spanish Speakers
Designed for students starting Italian in college with knowledge of Spanish as native, heritage, or second-language speakers, this is an introductory course on the fundamental skills of speaking, reading, writing and comprehending Italian with an emphasis on the numerous linguistic similarities between Italian and Spanish, as well as the fascinating commonalities between Italian and Spanish/Latin American cultures. Materials are adapted to the specific beginning level of the class leveraging the students’ high comprehension skills via translanguaging as well as their understanding of the transnational mobility of people and culture.
An “Italian for Spanish Speakers” course leverages the similarities between Italian and Spanish in vocabulary and grammar in order to accelerate the Italian language acquisition of speakers of Spanish. It utilizes the vast and growing body of literature on multi-lingualism, inter-comprehension and trans-languaging, which shows how the knowledge of two or more languages, and hence cultures, allows to fast-track learning in the classroom (see Resources below). The courses is taught in Italian like any other communicative-method course and expects students to produce orally and in writing in Italian, but includes regular comparisons with Spanish (and English when relevant) in the acquisition of vocabulary, grammar, and phonetics.
ITAL 111: Comprehensive Beginning Italian for Spanish Speakers
ITAL 211 Comprehensive Intermediate Italian for Spanish Speakers
Summer Italian Intensive Program for College Credit
From High School to Higher Ed... In Italian!
The Inserra Chair in Italian and Italian American Studies in connection with the Italian Program at Montclair, has offered a program that seamlessly links the high school and college learning experience at the pre-AP level, while granting 3 college credits.
Launched in 2017, the program is taught by a native speaker instructor and coordinated by an experienced high school teacher on the Montclair campus. The program aims to consolidate rising senior students’ intermediate Italian skills on their way to an advanced level. Students benefit from an engaging college experience on a campus boasting a dynamic Italian program and proximity to New York City. The course also includes off-campus activities such as visits at the MET or Magazzino, Eataly and various cultural centers (Tenement Museum) and Italian companies and stores in NYC (Scavolini, Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana, MO Gelato) and NJ (Botto Museum, Yogi Berra Museum).
Read More about the Program