"Over the last few years, the Italian Studies Program has been working on adding new courses and modules to teach inclusion, diversity, and gender equality at all levels, including second language acquisition classes in the requirement sequence. We strongly believe that learning a new language and culture can have a predominant role in shaping globally-oriented generations willing to improve the current social scenario, pursuing gender equality, inclusion and diversity transversally and at all levels. As a consequence, the Program has adopted more inclusive textbooks and material, organized events and activities to raise awareness on issues of diversity, inclusion, and gender equality in Italian society and beyond. This LTI project will be pursued by three faculty members in Italian Studies, which also includes the Co-Director of the Language Program, and will be part of our larger initiative to prepare students to deal with any aspects of the culture they are studying through the language, including issues concerning race, sexual orientation, and gender, among many other layers of identities, we will deal with. In doing so we wish to teach students about present-day Italian society and its many socio-cultural changes in comparison with the past. These changes are reflected also in the evolution of the Italian language and we believe that working also on how the socio-cultural context influences the language and vice versa is an essential step to pass students the appropriate tools to be successful in the discipline not only as language learners but as globally-oriented citizens of the (post-pandemic) world. We have a variety of interrelated activities which will be deployed in Fall 2021 and Spring 2022 in selected sections of ITAL1010/1020 and ITAL2010/20/30.