Our weekly meeting with “Our School” Professors has introduced us to a range of professional institutes. Gabriella Vicari teaches English at the Pellegrino Artusi Professional Institute for Enogastronomy and Hotelling in Rome. Prof. Vicari has been teaching there for many years as she finds it a stimulating challenge. In fact, the strength of professional institutes are the labs. As local innovation schools, they are conceived as research, testing and didactic innovation labs.
As usual, we share a short presentation video and then an interview conducted by Ilaria Gaudiello, who coordinates the works of the open source community of teachers and educators.
INTERVIEW
Gabriella, in your career as a teacher, how have digital tools promoted innovation and inclusion?
Over the years, didactic innovation has been addressed by various EU programmes - Comenius, Erasmus+, eTwinning – along with digital tools for their innovative drive. The integrated use of didactic platforms and flipped classrooms in my teaching and curricula have allowed me to develop projects that elicited students to use their cognitive, digital and soft skills to create original products. From this professional reality to the opportunity given to us by FMD with the “Our School” Network, the step was short.
You joined to establish new synergies and develop courses. What aspects of this experience have you found most interesting?
Working with my team was great fun. Everyone has a different background and know-how, and we shared our good practices, exchanging points of view on content and teaching approaches.
The course is based on a blended form of learning as the lever for inclusion. It provides an integrated approach between game-based and digital learning. It was interesting to employ digital tools not only as a vehicle for acquiring language skills through the use of chunks of language, but also to create attractive gaming dynamics to involve students. A further strong point of the project is the final peer-to-peer evaluation. The students become protagonists and responsible for their own education.
As an innovating teacher, do you have a didactic project that you would like to develop with “Our School”?
I would like to continue working on the game-based and digital apporach. I imagine taking a further step forward and developing an application that operates on linguistic structure, allowing students to record their voices and only being able to proceed to the next level when they compose sentences correctly.
