An online resource for learners across the Italian language community

A few years ago, Penn Italian-language lecturer Julia Heim began to notice a “huge disconnect” between the representation of Italian life in primary textbooks and the “actual, real lived experience in Italy.”

The textbooks were very homogenous, leaving out the experiences and lives of underrepresented Italians. In response, Heim found themself creating activities for their students with video clips to show that reality—including Italians of color, from the LGBTQ community, with disabilities, and others.

“It’s really important to recognize that Italy is a multicultural space. It isn’t just the kind of thing you might see in ‘Eat, Pray, Love,’ right?” says Heim, a scholar and translator of Italian media. “It is a living culture that we really need to do justice to. All Italians deserve a space.”

Four years ago, those activities grew into a full project, creating resources for learners across the Italian-language community. Heim secured a grant from the Penn Language Center and hired graduate student Samantha Gillen, now a lecturer at the University of Georgia, to work with them developing more activities. Fellow Penn lecturer Rossella Di Rosa joined as contributor and linguistic overseer, reviewing all the content as a native Italian speaker.

Additional support came from the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, the Penn Libraries Research Data & Digital Scholarship team, and a Sachs Curricular Support Grant. “We hit the ground running,” Heim says.

At the beginning, the project was a simple shared account to hold the projects, with each folder containing a video, a transcript, and the actual exercises, translated into both English and Italian and available in PDF and editable documents in case changes needed to be made later.

The project soon had a name, PRIMA, the Pedagogical Repository for Italian Media Activities. It launched in late 2024 at primalearning.org. “This isn’t just meant to teach the language but use all the voices that Italy has to offer,” Heim says.

As an open educational resource, PRIMA is intended to grow as others add to it. “Our primary goal is just spreading the word right now,” Heim says. “We’ve incorporated it into our classes at Penn, but I’m hoping anyone will find it useful because what a fun way to learn a language.”

Heim says a printed textbook “is so stale; once you print it, it can’t be changed.” By contrast, PRIMA is meant to be added to and grow “so in a way, it is an archive of the different kinds of historical moments of representation.”

The early years were spent developing activities and beta testing with both faculty and students, asking questions about what audiences were looking for, material formats, and what accessibility means. That core value ensures that learners can use the resources in multiple formats and on different devices.

The PRIMA site was designed to be used via two approaches: a traditional level-based format, where users can focus on elementary, intermediate, or advanced levels, and a topical system, where users can search lessons on culture, grammar, and vocabulary. Learning grammar through new songs, for example, may be more interesting for learners than other methods, Heim says.

Heim says the language-studies field includes many people who believe in inclusive practices. “But it isn’t necessarily yet a safe space for all learners or for all teachers,” they say. “I hope this is a first step that goes beyond tokenizing minority voices or checking a box for inclusivity.”

They add: “Language courses are often the last to catch up because the textbooks are very antiquated or outdated, but also because there are a lot of people that believe in a static, ‘traditional’ language. The feedback that I often get is, ‘Well, we have to teach real Italian first, and then we can make space.’ I don’t think that that’s true because you’re basically saying that my identity cannot be represented in my own language class.”