This proposal for a panel of four long papers stems from the ongoing discussion animated by the interdisciplinary group "Understanding Film and Media Cultures in a Digital World" (https://www.hastac.org/groups/understanding-film-and-media-cultures-digital-world). The group, created in September 2015 by a small network of HASTAC scholars and mentors based at Vanderbilt University and Queen’s University Belfast, explores issues related to digital pedagogy in these two, only apparently unrelated, disciplines: on the one hand, Foreign Languages; on the other, Media Studies. While cultural globalization and digital technologies have had an enormous impact on every field in the Humanities, these two disciplines have seen their very objects of study and pedagogical contexts dramatically affected by these phenomena. Only a few years ago, students’ direct contact with foreign-language texts, cultural works and speakers/writers, as well as with global media would mostly take place within the classroom, the library, and other few, selected places. Nowadays, thanks to our networked laptops and smartphones, such contact is uninterrupted and omnipresent. Teaching and learning cross-cultural and foreign-language media has thus to be conceptualized as a very different experience than in the recent past. The papers presented in this panel will explore this theme from different perspectives, trying to combine language-based and media-focused approaches. Hughes and Pagello will provide a general framework, building on linguistics and media theory, as well as on their different but finally not incomparable experiences of teaching Spanish in the American South, and teaching world cinema in Northern Ireland. Finch and Hagele will look at the uses of social media (respectively, Twitter and Instagram) in the foreign-language classroom. Ellis-Woods will reflect on the lessons to be learned from the history of the educational programming created by the BBC in the highly sensitive cross-cultural, multilingual environment of Northern Ireland.
