Amy Stornaiuolo is an associate professor in the Literacy, Culture, and International Education division, currently serving as chair of the Reading, Writing, and Literacy program. She is the Director of Undergraduate Programs for Penn GSE, advising undergraduates in the Urban Education minor and those interested in submatriculation. She is also the inaugural faculty director of the New College House West, the newest residential facility on Penn’s campus, after serving four years as faculty fellow in Riepe College House. She is co-editor of the journal Research in the Teaching of English.

Prior to joining the Penn GSE faculty, Dr. Stornaiuolo taught post-secondary composition and reading in the San Francisco Bay Area, with a focus specifically on community colleges. She has conducted research on reading/writing relationships, the social construction of remediation, and learning transfer across contexts. In the context of university-community partnerships with youth writers in middle and high school, she has studied young people’s practices with digital technologies and explored implications for teaching and learning in a shifting mediational landscape. Dr. Stornaiuolo teaches courses on adolescent literacy, the research and practice of writing, digital literacies, and digital methods.

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 has explored 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, and the Write4Change project, a global youth writing online community dedicated to creating social change through writing.

Publications

Featured Books

Handbook of Writing, Literacies, and Education in Digital Cultures

Selected Publications

Stornaiuolo, A. (2020). Developing data literacy with adolescents: Supporting youth as authors, architects, and interpreters of data. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 29(1), 81-103.

Stornaiuolo, A., & Nichols, T.P.* (2019). Cosmopolitanism and education. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Oxford University Press. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.252

Stornaiuolo, A., & Nichols, T.P. (2018). Making publics: Mobilizing audiences in high school makerspaces. Teachers College Record, 120(8), 1-38.

Mills, K. A., Stornaiuolo, A., Smith, A., & Pandya, J. Z. (Eds.). (2018). Handbook of writing, literacies, and education in digital cultures. New York, NY: Routledge.

Stornaiuolo, A., & Thomas, E. E. (2017). Disrupting educational inequalities through youth digital activism. Review of Research in Education, 41(1), 337–357.

Stornaiuolo, A., Smith, A., & Phillips, N. (2017). Theorizing a transliteracies framework for a connected world. Journal of Literacy Research, 49(1).

Thomas, E. E., & Stornaiuolo, A. (2016). Restorying the self: Bending toward textual justice. Harvard Educational Review, 86(3), 313–338.

Stornaiuolo, A. (2016). Teaching in global collaborations: Navigating challenging conversations through cosmopolitan activity. Teaching and Teacher Educatio, 59, 503–513. doi:10.1016/j.tate.2016.07.001

Stornaiuolo, A., & LeBlanc, R.J.* (2016). Scaling as a literacy activity: Mobility and educational inequality in an age of global connectivity. Research in the Teaching of English, 50(3), 263–287.

Hull, G., & Stornaiuolo, A. (2014). Cosmopolitan literacies, social networks, and “proper distance”: Striving to understand in a global world. Curriculum Inquiry, 44(1), 15–44.

Hull, G.A., & Stornaiuolo, A. (2010). Literate arts in a global world: Reframing social networking as cosmopolitan practice. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 54(2), 84–96.

Hull, G.A., Stornaiuolo, A., & Sahni, U. (2010). Cultural citizenship and cosmopolitan practice: Global youth communicate online. English Education, 42(4), 331–367.

Stornaiuolo, A., Hull, G.A., & Nelson, M. E. (2009). Mobile texts and migrant audiences: Rethinking literacy and assessment in a new media age. Language Arts, 86(5), 382–392.

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

Awards & Honors

Amy Stornaiuolo has been awarded $2.49 million from the McDonnel Foundation for her project, “Facilitating Digital Discourse: Teachers as Learners in a Digital Age.” In the project, Stornaiuolo and her team will examine how secondary English teachers learn to facilitate digital discourse in their classrooms, specifically focusing on online discussions. Stornaiuolo will work with Penn GSE's Ebony Elizabeth Thomas as well as colleagues at the National Writing Project, the Philadelphia Writing Project, the Denver Writing Project, the Institute of Cognitive Science, and Stanford University to execute the research.

Posted on April 15, 2020

Amy Stornaiuolo received a 2019 Emerald Literati Award, in the category of English Teaching: Practice and Critique, for her article with T. Philip Nichols and Veena Vasudevan, “Building spaces for literacy in school: mapping the emergence of a literacy makerspace.”

Posted on August 7, 2019

Amy Stornaiuolo, with Anna Smith of Illinois State University and Nathan Phillips of the University of Illinois at Chicago, has been awarded the 2018 Arthur Applebee Award for Excellence in Research on Literacy for the article "Developing a transliteracies framework for a connected world." The award is presented annually by the Literacy Research Association to honor the previous year's outstanding article in the field of literacy research.

Posted on December 5, 2018

Amy Stornaiuolo has won a $70,000 fellowship award through the National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship Program for her project, "Developing Data Literacy with Adolescents: Supporting Youth as Authors, Architects, and Interpreters of Data.” The project will investigate how high school students use data to develop actionable knowledge, particularly through data visualizations.

Posted on July 11, 2017

Designing the Impact Studio is a half a million-dollar grant funded by the National Science Foundation that will investigate how adolescents develop data literacy. Researchers will create a suite of visualization tools, called Impact Studio, and test it with participants in Write4Change, a virtual global community of students and educators. The tools will allow students to use data visualizations to test, revise, and more clearly express STEM-related concepts and ideas.

Posted on January 12, 2017

Journal Editorial Boards

Research in the Teaching of English

Editor