RAI news anchor skypes into St. Joe’s

A Saint Joseph's University professor is bringing Italy to Hawk Hill one teleconference at a time.

It's all thanks to Paola Giuli, Ph.D., and her vast network of contacts that she has been able to bring to campus. The Italian native has given students, mainly in her upper-division classes, a chance to interact first-hand with a number of notable Italians as part of her curriculum.

The connection has been made easier though technologies like Skype, which allow anyone with an Internet connection to communicate face-to-face. It's a technology that Giuli first used at home to connect with her elderly parents in Italy and that her students implored her to bring into the classroom.

"It was the students in my conversation class last year that when my mother called me—I was using my personal computer and she saw I was online but I was actually in class and I was showing something to class—I remember somebody saying, ‘Oh Dr. Giuli, why can't you speak to your mom?' she said. "And I was like, you know what, yes, it's a good idea for the students to speak to someone who is in Italy."

The guests she's brought to her class have come from a variety of backgrounds. One was prize-winning journalist Raffaella Brignetti, and just last week her students talked to Roberto Amen, a well-known news anchor and vice-director for RAI Parlamento, the Italian state-owned broadcasting network.

Giuli also brought in other friends and acquaintances from political and tourism circles in Italy, as well as connecting with students, both American and Italian, studying in Italy. She's worked closely with various agencies, including the Italian Consulate, to bring some of her ideas to life.

Giuli has orchestrated a number of events on campus, such as bringing speakers and other cultural events to campus. She has also worked to link the university's Italian program to many of the cultural events happening in the city of Philadelphia, like film festivals and other cultural enrichment opportunities.

"She's very active in trying to bring real-life, communicative activities to students and that means for them meaningful talking: talking about jobs, about the political situations, about economics and such," said Robert Daniel, Ph.D., chair of the Foreign Languages and Literatures Department. "She does that in a number of ways, but one of those ways is by organizing events either here or having students go off campus or to bring them to campus either virtually or in person."

The use of Skype and other methods of teleconferencing just make Giuli's attempts to bring "the experiential side of learning" into the classroom even easier.

"It really brings to bear on the functional use of language and contextual use of language," Giuli said. "We try to recreate in the classroom the situations of real life all the time. But when you can actually experience real life in the classroom by being place in a situation like interviewing a really person, I don't think it can get any better than that."

While Daniel and his department have been there to support Giuli's efforts as much as possible, he is cautious that her approach is something that can be implemented across the board in the department. One of his biggest reservations is that the amount of work Giuli puts forth to organize these events for her students is one that isn't easily replicated.

"She's kind of done a superhuman job," Daniel said. "There are other faculty who do some, but she truly is devoted to bringing as many enriching experiences to the campus as possible. If every single person in this program were doing this all the time, we wouldn't be able to keep up.

"In a sense, it is a great model, but I don't think it's a model that you could apply widely and do it on the scale she has," continued Daniel. "One or two events per semester per language, perhaps. But to do the number of events and the kind of events with the kind of temporal density that she does, I don't think it's possible."