UMass Amherst Libraries Announce Publication of Openly Licensed Textbook, Tutt* a tavola!

The University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries are pleased to announce the publication of the openly licensed textbook, Tutt* a tavola! Dr. Stacy Giufre and Dr. Melina Masterson were 2020 recipients of two Open Education Initiative grants that are funded by the Provost’s Office and University Libraries.

Tutt* a tavola! is a two-volume textbook for Elementary Italian (Italian 110 and 120, over two semesters). The book is meant to be comprehensive, user-friendly, inclusive, and cost-effective. Tutt* a tavola! has two parts, one for each course, with six chapters in each. Each chapter addresses three to four grammatical topics and includes a vocabulary section related to a cultural theme. The vocabulary is incorporated into the grammatical presentations and exercises. There is also a short reading in each chapter regarding different aspects of culture and language, to address questions of diversity and inclusion that are often missing from traditional textbooks. To include more culture, the authors have included multimedia: each chapter begins with a song that is used as a starting point for the inductive presentation of the chapter’s content, and ends with a video (a film clip, an interview, social media) that summarizes the ideas covered.

Accessible, online versions of the volumes are available at the University Libraries open books website: https://openbooks.library.umass.edu/tutt-a-tavola-vol-1/ and https://openbooks.library.umass.edu/tutt-a-tavola-vol-2/.

In addition to being utilized in the Italian Language Program at UMass Amherst, the textbook is being used by instructors at Napa Valley Community College (CA) and Providence College (RI).

Giufre and Masterson presented on the development of this textbook at the 2021 Foreign Language OER Conference at the University of Kansas held virtually on March 6. This conference was sponsored by KU’s The Open Language Resource Center and the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning.  They are continuing to share their work in open education by organizing roundtables for Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) (Baltimore, MD, spring 2022) and American Association for Italian Studies (AAIS)/American Association of Teachers of Italian (AATI) joint conference (Lucca, Italy, May 2022).