Professional Biography
Amy Stornaiuolo is an associate professor in the Learning, Teaching, and Literacies division. She is currently serving as chair of the Literacy Studies program (previously called the Reading, Writing, and Literacy, or RWL, program). She is the Director of Undergraduate Programs for Penn GSE, advising undergraduates in the Urban Education minor and those interested in the Accelerated Bachelor's to Master's Degree Program. 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.
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.
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, and the Write4Change project, a global youth writing online community dedicated to creating social change through writing.
Selected Publications
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Journal Editorial Board
Research in the Teaching of English
Editorial Board