Italian Teaching Symposium 2026 | Creative Pathways in Italian Language and Culture Teaching

The symposium will take place Friday, September 25, and Saturday, September 26, 2026, in a hybrid format, with opportunities to participate both in person at St. Jerome's University (federated with the University of Waterloo) and online. We gratefully acknowledge the generous support of our sponsors: St. Jerome's University, the Canadian Association for Italian Studies (CAIS), and the Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Toronto, whose contributions have made this event possible.

We are delighted to announce that our keynote speaker will be Prof. Camilla Zamboni, Associate Professor of the Practice in Italian and Education Studies at Wesleyan University. Her keynote address, "Playfulness and Creativity in Language and Culture Pedagogy", will explore innovative approaches to language pedagogy informed by her work at the intersection of language learning, open educational resources (OERs), analog game-based learning, and tabletop game design.

The symposium will also feature a special conversation with award-winning Canadian writer Eufemia Fantetti. Author of A Recipe for Disaster & Other Unlikely Tales of Love, winner of the Bressani Prize, and My Father, Fortune-tellers & Me: A Memoir, a finalist for the 2024 Canadian Book Club Awards, Fantetti is a fiction writer, memoirist, essayist, and educator at Humber College and the University of Guelph-Humber. Drawing on both her writing and teaching experiences, she will reflect on the relationship between creative writing, teaching, and identity, exploring how her experience as the daughter of Italian immigrants has shaped both her literary work and her pedagogical practice.