by Serena Bassi & Ellen Nerenberg
This article describes and reflects upon a pedagogical project that depended on collaboration between the two authors, upper-level Italian students at Wesleyan University and the Bologna-based LGBTQ+ center, Il Cassero. The collaboration centered on and unfolded from an undergraduate course entitled “Coming Out/Coming of Age: Narratives of Becoming in Contemporary Italian Culture” taught by Ellen Nerenberg. The course sought to introduce students to a number of Italian coming of age literary and visual texts, as well as theoretical frameworks in Queer Studies and critical theory more broadly exploring subjectivity, becoming, gender, and sexuality. As part of the course, students participated in a co-laboratorio which focused specifically on a semester-long project in which students interviewed members of Bologna’s thriving LGBT community about their personal stories of “coming out” and identifying as queer at different moments in recent Italian history. The co-laboratorio nested within the course and the authors supported students as they devised their own oral history project in the co-laboratorio. Support involved both logistics (putting students in contact with the interview subjects) as well as theory, as the authors helped students understand the parameters of conducting empirical research self-reflexively. The article locates this collaborative experiment within the broadlines of an Italian Studies curriculum and within the context of current debates about transnational approaches to teaching foreign languages in Northern American classrooms. In this sense, the authors attempted to foster “transcultural competence” and encourage students to think critically about their role as student researcher approaching a different culture through the medium of an acquired language.