What is the STEMCo Project?

Hello everyone,

My name is Andrea Leone-Pizzighella. I’ve been working in the field of educational linguistics since 2007, and today I’m a researcher at the Institute of Applied Linguistics at Eurac Research. My goal is to gain a deeper understanding of how the world of education really works.

As an educational linguist, my research in Italian secondary schools lies at the intersection of linguistics, anthropology, and the educational sciences. Currently, thanks to a Marie Skłodowska-Curie research fellowship, I am conducting a participatory research project in two middle schools in northern Italy.

Through the STEMCo project (Stances Toward Education in Multilingual Contexts), and this website in particular, I aim to bridge the gap between research and classroom practice. Above, you’ll find more information about the project, including how I use ethnography as a research methodology to offer Italian teachers a perspective on their practices from both the inside and the outside. The purpose of ethnography is to make the familiar seem strange: to view everyday practices—which sometimes become routine—from a new perspective.

My approach is simple: I draw on the direct involvement of those who experience school life every day to transform my classroom observations into concrete tools for teachers. These tools are sometimes open-access teaching materials that are easy to use and accessible to everyone. Other times, they are concepts or ways of thinking that help teachers—of all subjects—discover, and thus use, the communicative resources in their classrooms as a genuine tool to facilitate teaching and learning.

Because this project was conducted in Italian-language schools, please note that all multimedia resources and many of the language foci are also in Italian. If you are curious about how these relate to what we may see in other languages, please reach out!

This site will be available as Open Access, completely free of charge, until 2035. I hope you find it useful, and if so, that you’ll recommend it to your colleagues.

Best of luck with your work!