"In Immigrant Students and Literacy, Campano has written about important and contentious topics such as accountability, language and literacy curriculum highly attuned to refugee experiences, the problematic nature of 'best practices' and 'research-based,' and teaching as ethical practice. Campano's writing on these weighty topics has benefited from a light – better, a poetic – hand, producing a graceful, accessible and moving text." – NCTE Press Release regarding the David H. Russell Award

Bio Nav

Biography

Professional Biography

Dr. Gerald Campano is Professor and Chair of the Literacy, Culture, and International Education Division at the Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania. For close to 10 years, he worked as a public-school teacher, during which time he garnered district teacher of the year awards and was a Carnegie Scholar. Dr. Campano’s scholarly interests span elementary literacy teaching, critical ethnic studies, immigrant education, and practitioner and participatory research approaches. Throughout his academic career, he has been interested in universalizing research as an epistemic right through community-based inquiry methodologies premised on an ethics of care and interdependence.

Research Interests and Current Projects

Dr. Campano’s current research project is now a decade-long research-practice partnership with a faith-based organization in South Philadelphia, which has been supported by grants from the Spencer Foundation and the American Educational Research Association. The partnership involves thinking and researching alongside families from diverse cultural and linguistic communities as they investigate issues of social inequity and construct a shared vision of educational justice and immigrant rights that may be shared in teacher professional learning contexts. Dr. Campano is also involved in a collaboration with colleagues from the University of Guadalajara, exploring literacy teacher education from a transnational and decolonial perspective.

Dr. Campano’s first book, Immigrant Students and Literacy: Reading, Writing, and Remembering, received the 2009 David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research in the Teaching of English from the National Council for the Teachers of English (NCTE). His most recent co-authored book, Partnering with Immigrant Communities: Action through Literacy, also received the David H. Russell Award in 2018 as well as the Edward B. Fry Book Award from the Literacy Research Association (LRA) in 2017. Dr. Campano is currently a co-editor for Research in the Teaching of English, president of the National Council of Research on Language and Literacy, and recent chair of the Ethics Committee for LRA. He has roughly 75 scholarly publications and has chaired about 35 dissertations.

Publications

Featured Books

Partnering With Immigrant Communities: Action Through Literacy

Literacy Tools in the Classroom

Immigrant Students and Literacy

Selected Publications

Campano, G., Ghiso, M. P., Rusoja, A., Player, G., & Schwab, E. (in press). “Education without boundaries”: Literacy pedagogies and human rights. Language Arts [Research and Policy Directions; Editorial review]

Ghiso, M. P., Campano, G., Player, G., & Rusoja, A. (2016). Dialogic teaching and multilingual counterpublics. L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 16, 1–26. [Special Issue on International Perspectives on Dialogic Theory and Practice]

Campano, G., Ghiso, M. P., & Welch, B. (2016). Partnering with immigrant communities: Action through literacy. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Simon, R., & Campano, G. (2015). Hermeneutics of literacy pedagogy. Handbook of literacy studies (pp. 472-486). New York, NY. Routledge.

Campano, G., Ngo, L., & Player, G. (2015). Researching from buried experiences: Collaborative inquiry with Asian American youth. LEARNingLandscapes, 8(2), 77–94

Campano, G., Ngo, L., Low, D. E., & Jacobs, K. B. (2015). Young children demystifying and remaking the university through critical play. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy. Published online first, April 7, 2015, doi: 10.1177/1468798415577875.

Campano, G., Ghiso, M. P., & Welch, B. (2015). Ethical and professional norms in community-based research. Harvard Educational Review, 85(1), 29–49.

Campano, G. (2013). Literacy in/for action: Prefigurative pedagogies and collective knowledge projects. Journal of Literacy and Composition Studies, 1(2), 78–85.

Campano, G., Ghiso, M. P., & Sánchez, L. (2013). “No one knows the…amount of a person”: Elementary students critiquing dehumanization through organic critical literacies. Research in the Teaching of English, 48(1), 98–125.

Simon, R., & Campano, G. (2013). Activist literacies: Teacher research as resistance to the “normal curve.” Journal of Language and Literacy Education, 9(1), 21–39.

Ghiso, M. P. & Campano, G. (2013). Examining language ideologies in multilingual children’s literature. Bookbird, 51(3), 47–55.

Ghiso, M. P., & Campano, G. (2013). Coloniality in education: Negotiating discourses of immigration in schools and communities through border thinking. Equity and Excellence in Education, 46(2), 252–269.

Campano, G., Ghiso, M. P., Yee, M., & Pantoja, A. (2013). Toward community research and coalitional literacy practices for educational justice. Language Arts, 90(5), 314–326.

Ghiso, M. P., Campano, G., & Hall, T. (2012). Braided histories and experiences in literature for children and adolescents. Journal of Children’s Literature, 38(2), 14–22.

Simon, R., Campano, G., Broderick, D., & Pantoja, A. (2012). Activist methodologies: Theorizing literacy from practice. Special issue on research methodologies, English: Practice and Critique, 11(2), 5–24.

Campano, G., & Ghiso, M. P. (2011). Immigrant students as cosmopolitan intellectuals. In S. Wolf, P. Coates, P. Enciso, & C. Jenkins (Eds.), Handbook on research on children’s and young adult literature (pp. 164–176). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Campano, G., Honeyford, M., Sánchez, L., & Vander Zanden, S. (2010). Ends in themselves: Theorizing the practice of university-school partnering through horizontalism. Language Arts, 87(4), 277–286.

Beach, R., Campano, G., Edminston, B., & Borgmann, M. (2010). Literacy tools in the classroom: Teaching through critical inquiry. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Campano, G. (2009). Teacher research as a collective struggle for humanizaiton. In M. Cochran-Smith & L. Lytle (Eds.), Inquiry as stance: Practitioner research for the next generation. (pp. 347-381). New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Vasudevan, L., & Campano, G. (2009). The social production of risk and the promise of adolescent literacies. Review of Research in Education, 33(1), 310–353.

Campano, G. (2007, October). Honoring student stories. Educational Leadership, 65(2), 48–54.

Campano, G. (2007). Immigrant students and literacy: Reading, writing, and remembering. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Damico, J. S., Campano, G., & Harste, J. (2008). Transactional and critical theory and reading comprehension. In S. Israel & G. Duffy (Eds.), Handbook of research on reading comprehension (pp. 177–188). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Damico, J. S., Campano, G., & Harste, J. (2007). From contexts to contextualizing and re-contextualizing: The work of teaching. In L. Rush, A. Berger, & J. Eakle (Eds.), Secondary school reading and writing: What research reveals for classroom practices (pp. 203–216). Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

News & Media

Penn GSE News

Shaping a legendary literacy journal’s future

Penn GSE’s Gerald Campano, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, and Amy Stornaiuolo are now editing Research in the Teaching of English.

January 31, 2019

Penn GSE Team Fosters Truly Collaborative Community-Based Research in South Philly

A Spencer Foundation grant will enhance the collaborative work over the next three years.

December 4, 2017

Awards & Honors

Gerald Campano, Professor and Chair of the Literacy, Culture, and International Education Division, has been awarded the 2021 Spencer Mentor Award. This award provides $10,000 grants to mentors who have demonstrated extraordinary contributions to supporting the research training and career trajectories of graduate students and junior scholars who engage in education research, broadly construed.

His nomination letter from Tamara Spencer of Saint Mary’s College of California describes his work: “Dr. Campano has created a structure that fosters long-term mentoring relationships between university researchers and public school students and their families, forming bonds and connections that have persisted for a decade. Through his mentorship, families and youth of color have made their voices and research public, cowriting and co-presenting their work to national audiences. These collaborations have been transformative for all involved…Middle schoolers and immigrant parents who could speak directly to educators about educational change; graduate students who as a result can see other ways of being in the academy; and audience members who are inspired by the activist and scholarly research of community leaders and young people in today’s schools.”

For nearly 10 years, Campano worked as a public school teacher, during which time he earned district teacher of the year awards and was a Carnegie Scholar. Throughout his academic career, he has been interested in universalizing research through community-based inquiry based on an ethics of care and interdependence.

The grant is intended to support the ongoing mentorship of the winner. Campano is one of three recipients chosen for the 2021 award.

Posted on March 4, 2021

Gerald Campano, with María Paula Ghiso of Teachers College, Columbia University and Bethany Welch of the Aquinas Center, has received the 2018 David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research in the Teaching of English from the National Council of Teachers of English for the book, "Partnering with Immigrant Communities: Action Through Literacy."

Posted on January 7, 2019

Penn GSE’s research-practice partnership with the Aquinas Center, a faith-based community organization, received a $400,000 grant from the Spencer Foundation to fund the expansion of methodologies, solidify technological infrastructure, and support Aquinas Center community members. The long-term partnership draws on the diverse linguistic and cultural experiences of immigrant, refugee, and historically disenfranchised families and communities in American cities to illuminate ways these groups cooperate across social and linguistic boundaries to access educational resources.

Posted on January 19, 2017

Journal Editorial Boards

Research in the Teaching of English

Editor