Dr. Stornaiuolo received her Ph.D. in Language, Literacy, and Culture from the University of California at Berkeley in 2012. Her research examines adolescents' multimodal composing practices, teachers' uses of digital technologies, and shifting relationships between authors and audiences in online, networked spaces. 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. In prior work, Dr. Stornaiuolo has taught post-secondary composition and reading in college and conducted research on reading/writing relationships, the social construction of remediation, and learning transfer across contexts.

She has received a number of awards and fellowships for her work, including the 2011 Janet Emig Award from the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Conference on English Education, the 2013 Elva Knight award from the International Reading Association (now ILA), the 2013 Promising Researcher Award from NCTE, and the 2015 Steve Cahir Early Career Award from the Writing & Literacies Special Interest Group (SIG) of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). She currently serves as the Program Chair of AERA's Writing and Literacies SIG and on the technology committee of the Literacy Research Association (LRA). She was recently selected as a 2017 National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation postdoctoral fellow.

Research Interests and Current Projects

Drawing on ethnographic and sociocultural lenses, Dr. Stornaiuolo's work examines young people’s practices with digital technologies and the implications for teaching and learning in a shifting mediational landscape. At the core of her scholarship is a central commitment to working in partnership with individuals and communities, not only in documenting the literacy lives of young people but also in practicing humanizing research alongside youth and communities, particularly those historically marginalized, in order to address systems of inequality. Her scholarship explores the myriad challenges of mediated communication, highlighting the importance – and difficulty – of connecting productively across race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, gender, and other categories of difference. Her work concentrates on how schools and other learning environments can facilitate deep, connected, digitally-facilitated learning that connects young people to the world around them and supports their development as ethically-attuned authors and creators.

Dr. Stornaiuolo is currently the principal investigator of a National Science Foundation project aimed at studying how adolescents produce and use data visualizations to guide their composing and revision processes in an online writing community. As part of this NSF project, she and her partners are developing and studying the internationally connected online writing community, Write4Change, in which adolescents and educators collaborate to work toward social change. She is also the principal investigator for a long-term literacy collaboration with a technology and design-oriented high school in Philadelphia. In this ethnographic design research project, she has been working closely with school stakeholders over three years to design and study how the high school's makerspaces can support students' literacy and learning across the school. Dr. Stornaiuolo is also an affiliated researcher with the Center on Standards, Alignment, Instruction, and Learning (CSAIL), which examines the implementation of college- and career-ready standards nationally.

Publications

Featured Books

Handbook of Writing, Literacies, and Education in Digital Cultures

Selected Publications

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

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