Biography
Amy Stornaiuolo is a professor of literacy education in the Literacy Studies program within the Learning, Teaching, and Literacies division. She is the inaugural faculty director of the Gutmann College House, the newest residential facility on Penn’s campus, after serving four years as faculty fellow in Riepe College House. She has served as the faculty director of the Philadelphia Writing Project, chair of the Literacy Studies program (formerly, Reading/Writing/Literacies), and director of undergraduate education programs.
Prior to joining the Penn GSE faculty, Dr. Stornaiuolo taught post-secondary composition and reading in the San Francisco Bay Area, conducting research on the social construction of remediation and learning transfer across contexts in relation to community colleges. She has worked extensively with community and school partners, collaborating with teams of teachers, leaders, and middle and high school students to study the implications of digital technologies for teaching and learning. Dr. Stornaiuolo teaches courses on adolescent literacy, the research and practice of writing, digital literacies, and digital methods.
Dr. Stornaiuolo has received numerous grants and awards for her research on digital literacies, including the Steve Cahir Early Career Award (AERA Writing & Literacies SIG), Divergent Award for Excellence in 21st Century Literacies, and a 2017 National Academy of Education/Spencer postdoctoral fellowship. She is past chair of the American Educational Research Association’s Writing and Literacies Special Interest Group and former editor of the flagship research journal of the National Council of Teachers of English, Research in the Teaching of English.
Research Interests and Current Projects
Dr. Stornaiuolo’s research focuses on people’s digital literacy practices, especially how digital technologies support cross-cultural learning opportunities. Interested in literacy’s mobile dimensions, she studies the shifting relationships between authors and audiences online and adolescents’ multimodal composing practices across space and time. More broadly, her work centers on how to create equitable and accessible learning opportunities for young people by examining how they draw on diverse cultural and linguistic repertoires as they participate in richly literate lives.
With an explicit focus on designing equitable and humanizing conditions for learning, Dr. Stornaiuolo has focused her career on building sustainable, long-term partnerships, collaborating with communities and partners to enact meaningful change for educational justice, and designing and engaging in participatory and innovative digital methodologies. By studying people’s deep, connected, digitally mediated learning with and about the world, Dr. Stornaiuolo explores how schools and other learning environments can facilitate young people’s development as civically engaged and ethically attuned authors and social actors. Her scholarship explores the myriad challenges of mediated communication, highlighting the importance—and difficulties—of connecting productively across multiple categories of difference in online spaces.
She has led several large-scale research projects related to the role of digital technologies in teaching and learning across contexts, studying school makerspaces, young people’s authoring practices with digital tools and spaces, adolescents’ data literacy practices and the development of student-facing data analytics, and teachers’ inquiry-based learning with technology. She is currently the principal investigator of the Digital Discourse Project, a McDonnell Foundation-funded study about how teachers learn to facilitate online literature discussions; the Write4Change project, a global youth writing online community dedicated to creating social change through writing; and the Writing with AI (WAi) project, which explores how youth writers learn and write with generative AI.
Publications
Featured Publications
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Journal Editorial Board
Learning, Media, and Technology
Editorial Board
Research in the Teaching of English
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Written Communication
Editorial Board