Welcome to my digital hub!
My name is Camilla – I am a faculty member at Wesleyan University, in Middletown, CT. I primarily work in the Italian section of the Department of Romance Languages and Literature and in the College of Education Studies. I am also affiliated with the College of Design and Engineering Studies and the Center for Global Studies.
My research and teaching are focused on innovative, reflective, and radical pedagogy – at the nexus of language learning, educational game design, analog game-based learning, and open educational resources (OERs).
I am the co-editor of the volume Roll for Learning (Play Story Press, 2024), a collection of educational micro tabletop role-playing games to use in the classroom curated with Matthew Farber and William Merchant (find a podcast about the volume here). I have also published in journals like Italica and TILCA on L2 pedagogy and its interplay with game-based learning and game design – my latest article is titled “Language, Play, Storytelling: Tabletop Role-Playing Games in the Italian L2 Classroom” (Italica, 2024). I routinely presents at invited workshops, talks, and international conferences about using tabletop games within pedagogical contexts, particularly in language learning classes and curricula.
At Wesleyan, I have merged her pedagogical research and teaching practice. I have created an OER-based Intermediate Italian curriculum at Wesleyan, Assaggi, which is currently used for the Intermediate Italian course sequence (ITAL 111 and 112) and offered to students at no cost; she is currently at work on a new OER-based Elementary Italian curriculum, Passi.
I also routinely teach the Educational Game Design Lab, a project-based course that brings together elements of game-based learning and tabletop game design and where students create and develop game prototypes with specific learning goals (a selection of games by students over different semesters can be found on the course website).
I am also a game designer and translator, creating or adapting tabletop games for language learning and other educational goals. Her latest projects include a collaboration with the Italian company Wattajob to develop a tabletop role-playing game to discuss bias at the workplace, called Bias Breaker; a tabletop role-playing game to create and play through folklore and legends, called Folk; and a language learning tabletop role-playing game, currently in playtesting and development, called Planétes. Her other game projects (original games, game translations, and game editing) can be found on her Itch.io page.
Other ongoing projects are Italian Board Game Nights, a series of extracurricular events where students and faculty play tabletop games in Italian together; ITAL 220, a course where students play tabletop games in Italian and assess their efficacy for language learning; and WeScrive, a magazine in Italian written and edited by Wesleyan students (currently on hiatus).
Future projects include a gamification project at the University of Edinburgh in May 2025, an invited webinar with Italian publisher Alma Edizioni, and an invited workshop at the Dante Alighieri association in Ciudad de México in late 2025.
My areas of interest and expertise are: analog game-based learning, educational game design, second language acquisition, SL/FL pedagogy, curriculum design, open educational resources, Italian language and culture.
If you would like to get in touch to discuss a project, learn more about what I do, or chat about languages, pedagogy, or games, please see my Contact information.
