Found in Translation. A Foreign Language Activity as an Exercise in Critical Cultural Awareness Seminar
- Time:
- 17:00 - 18:30
- Date:
- 17 November 2021
- Venue:
- on line
Event details
ABSTRACT Grounded in my long-time experience as a Foreign Language teacher in multicultural urban contexts, and in my research mainly focused on Critical Language Studies, Intercultural Education and Critical Pedagogies, my talk will sustain that a critical approach to the experience of foreign languages opens up to a different apprehension of the self and the others, remodulating individual and collective identities and thus questioning and challenging meanings, assumptions, conceptualizations and representations ordinarily taken-for-granted of individuals and groups. Within such a perspective, I will discuss the foreign language class as an ideal site to develop critical intercultural awareness, also presenting one of the activities I developed for multicultural/multilingual students in a high school in Italy. I will illustrate how, by favouring a meta-reflection on one’s own language and system of cultural references, translation can become a significant exercise in critical intercultural awareness.
Speaker information
Dr Paola Giorgis. Paola Giorgis (BA, MA in English and North-American Literature and Studies) holds a PhD in Anthropology of Education and Intercultural Education. She teaches English language, Literature, and Visual Arts in Italian high schools. Her main interest regards a critical, intercultural, and interdisciplinary approach to (foreign) languages and Foreign Language Education able to develop an awareness on how words are used and mobilized in education and public discourse. She integrates theoretical references, practices, and research to show how languages inform individual and collective identities and representations, serving processes of manipulation and domination, as well as those of empowerment and emancipation. She has published two monographs, several articles, chapters in collective works and she has participated to many international conferences. She is co-founder and member of wom.an.ed (women's studies in anthropology and education), collaborates to international journals as member of the Editorial Board and reviewer, and is affiliated to several international associations of Linguistics and Intercultural Studies.