Professional Biography
Gerald Campano is Professor in the Learning, Teaching, and Literacies Division at the Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania. He is a proud third generation Pinoy from the East Coast with ancestral roots in the Mindanao region of the Philippines. Gerald served as chair for his division at GSE for nine years. 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
Campano’s current research project is now an over 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. Visit the trailer for a documentary about this project. Campano is also involved in a collaboration with colleagues from the University of Guadalajara, exploring literacy teacher education from a transnational and decolonial perspective.
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. Campano is currently a co-editor for Research in the Teaching of English and is out-going president of the National Council of Research on Language and Literacy (NCRLL). Between 2011 and 2020, he served as chair of the former Reading/Writing/Literacy Division and then the former Literacy, Culture, and International Education Division at Penn GSE. Campano previously served as co-convenor for the Ethnography in Education Research Forum.
Campano has directed about 35 dissertations. In 2021 he was chosen for a Spencer Mentor Award of the Spencer Foundation.
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