Lavinia Bracci
Director, Co-Founder, Professor
Born in Siena, Italy Lavinia Bracci is founder and director of Siena Italian Studies – Intercultural Study Abroad, which hosts educational exchange programs for undergraduate students as well as the Italian portion of the Graduate Program of International Development and Service organized by the International Partnership for Service-Learning.
Her research focus and interests are centered on innovative pedagogies in the field of Intercultural Studies and Intercultural Competence assessment. Through using service as an instructional tool she invented the FICCS (Full-Immersion: Culture Content and Service) approach to develop reflective intercultural competence and co-authored a book on this approach entitled L’educazione riflessiva interculturale: L’approccio FICCS allo studio della lingua e cultura italiana. The FICCS approach was implemented in other European contexts (Portugal and Spain) and co-financed by the European Union through the Lifelong Learning Programme (Key Activity 2 Languages) turning into the EUFICCS (European Use of Full-immersion, Culture, Content, Service) methodology for Language Learning. Recently she has co-authored several publications on the FICCS and EUFICCS approaches as well as research on the Reflective Intercultural Competence Assessment (RICA) Model. She has also recently co-authored the book Reflective Intercultural Education for Democratic Culture and Engaged Citizens (Cambridge Scholars, 2020). Her and her team’s research has been presented in numerous conferences in Asia, North America and Europe. She holds a degree in Translation and Simultaneous Interpreting in German and Russian and taught foreign languages and Italian as a second language for many years. Currently she is teaching Intercultural Reflections for both undergraduate and graduate students at SIS and the course of Intercultural Dialogue, Democracy and Global Citizenship through Reflection.
Lavinia has also created and developed multidestination programs for international students in Belgium and Cameroon. She has recently been trained to become a EU project expert and is currently in charge of European project planning.