IWL Grantees’ Poster Session

Attendees are invited to circulate the poster sessions and interact with UVA scholars as they discuss their research projects. In this poster session, the recipients of IWL Course Enhancement Grant will present their innovative projects and their impact on their students’ language and cultural proficiency. Esther Poveda (Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese) will talk about analyzing students’ emotional responses in community-based language learning courses. Francesca Calamita (Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese) will present her new Italian textbook that is for the first time in the history of the field utilizes gender equality and inclusive language. Shu-Chen, Chen (Department of East Asian Languages, Literatures and Cultures) will share her incites on online tutoring. And Ran Zhao (Department of East Asian Languages, Literatures and Cultures) will present the poster about her new calligraphy course. All projects participating in this session explore new aspects of language teaching applicable to educators in other fields. In this session we will approach language acquisition through such aspects as empathy and compassion, gender equality and inclusivity, artistic expression, and wellbeing. During this poster session you will learn about the process of creating a new language textbook and organizing a community-based language course and online tutoring sessions. Before the poster session, you can learn more about each research project through the brief descriptions below.  

Esther Poveda, Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese

Title: From Empathy to Compassion: Analyzing Students' Emotional Responses in Community-Based Language Learning Courses

Description: In this presentation, Esther Poveda will share preliminary results from a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) research project that she has conducted in the advanced community-based language learning courses that she teaches. In the study, Esther tracks and analyzes expressions of empathy and of compassion —the latter understood as a more fully social and political emotion than empathy— in students’ critical reflections, some of the other artifacts they produce in the course sequence (experiential academic essays, educational materials projects, and final reflections), and personal interviews to identify the moments when a shift occurs, as well as the factors that contribute to the change in emotional response.

Francesca Calamita, Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese

Title: DiversITALY

Description: DiversITALY the first textbook around the world to teach and learn Italian with gender equality and inclusive language.

Shu-Chen, Chen, East Asian Languages, Literatures and Cultures

Title: The Efficacy of Online Tutoring

Description: Shu-Chen will be reporting about the efficacy of online tutoring and how it helped with language acquisition for my two sections of CHIN2021 students in fall, 2019. 

Ran Zhao, East Asian Languages, Literatures and Cultures

Title: Unlocking the Treasure Box of East Asian Calligraphy

Description: In this poster session, Dr. Ran Zhao will share how the new calligraphy course had been designed and implemented for Fall 2022 semester with the generous support of the IWL Course Enhancement Grant. Audience can expect to see the course objectives, teaching resources, in-class activities, homework assignments, and student projects and reflections. Dr. Zhao will use all the above information to illustrate how this course has provided students with multiple treasures of language study, artistic expression, cultural understanding, intellectual expansion, and a contemplative practice for lifelong learning and wellbeing.