Amy Stornaiuolo

• Ph.D
• Professor (Associate) at University of Pennsylvania

This discussion introduces a heuristic to guide writing instruction with adolescents and young adults. Our framework, called “Open World Writing,” consists of six writing territories (vision, material, design, voice, flow, polish) that provide focus and clarity for writing and educators working across academic and creative writing projects. We desc...

Researchers who study multilingual literacy development face the reality of complex and ever evolving conceptualizations of multilingualism and literacy across dynamic contexts, languages, and modalities. To unlock the full potential of continuous developments in Applied Linguistics, innovative rethinking of methodological approaches is needed to k...

English teacher-researchers involved in an inquiry group share how they use digital discourse for deeper purposes in diverse classrooms.

This chapter provides a systematic review of research published between 2006 and 2022 on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) platforms in writing instruction. We theorize writing and platforms as complex ecologies, investigating the interplay of their relations and implications for educational equity. Our findings suggested three functional cat...

Many education leaders may wonder how to implement sustainable policy changes that will benefit youth, families, and the community. Arielle Lentz, Laura Desimone, Amy Stornaiuolo, Katie Pak, Nelson Flores, Philip Nichols, Morgan Polikoff, and Andy Porter share findings from school change efforts in more than 170 districts in five states. They prese...

Purpose With the rapid advancement of generative artificial intelligence (AI), it is important to consider how young people are making sense of these tools in their everyday lives. Drawing on critical postdigital approaches to learning and literacy, this study aims to center the experiences and perspectives of young people who encounter and experim...

In this study, we explore discussions of literature in a high school English Language Arts (ELA) classroom, examining how students read rhetorically. Reading rhetorically considers the ethical effects of narrative content as it is mediated through character dialogue and action, narrator discourse, and the author's organization: a narrative as a sto...

This article explores the mobile and material dimensions of a writing practice we call pocket writing. Emergent in our 6-year ethnographic fieldwork at a public high school, this practice involved adolescents composing and carrying their self-sponsored writing close to their bodies. We consider the pocket both a physical artifact—the place from whi...

This study examines implementation of college-and-career-ready (CCR) education standards across five school districts in Ohio, Texas, California, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. Drawing on the policy attributes theory, we found that the specificity of districts’ approaches to two long-recognized policy levers, curriculum and professional learning,...

Two central tensions—structure and privacy—emerged when a group of teachers developed Write4Change, an online writing space that connected students in the United States, Italy, and South Korea.

Purpose Adaptivity has long been recognized as a key aspect of teaching and shown to be particularly important for English Language Arts (ELA) teachers leading discussions about texts. Teachers' abilities to make such adjustments are especially important when facilitating discussions in digital contexts, as was made clear with the shift to virtual...

In this contribution to the Platform Studies in Education symposium, Luci Pangrazio, Amy Stornaiuolo, T. Philip Nichols, Antero Garcia, and Thomas M. Philip explore how digital platforms can be used to build knowledge and understanding of datafication processes among teachers and students. The essay responds to the turn toward data-driven teaching...

In this article, the authors offer ‘timelapse’—removing frames from video footage to effectively ‘speed up’ visual activity—as an experimental method for engaging in the practice of seeing the emergence and contingency of activity across different timescales and in collaboration with participants. Building on previous calls to zoom up and out in an...

The collection of papers represented in the Integrative Research Review responds to the question: How can we study children’s/youth’s out of school experiences to inform classroom practices? Using a variety of lenses to address the question, the authors consider how to understand, respond to, and serve children and youth in a variety of contexts. D...

This article centers sociocultural and sociopolitical considerations of how young people understand, represent, and use data by presenting findings from a social design research study about how students in a public urban high school authored “data stories” using personal data they curated, collected, and visualized. The study contributes to theoret...

As literacy researchers trace how people make meaning across multiple contexts and online environments, ethical complexities arise that require researchers to be culturally attuned, flexible, innovative, and reflexive. This article draws on a transliteracies perspective to argue that ethical issues related to accessibility, positionality, relationa...

In this article, we examine the historical emergence of the concept of “digital literacy” in education to consider how key insights from its past might be of use in addressing the ethical and political challenges now being raised by connective media and mobile technologies. While contemporary uses of digital literacy are broadly associated with acc...

This study identifies seven major trends in how states and districts are implementing college- and career-ready standards for general education students and for two special populations often the target of education policy—English language learners (ELLs) and students with disabilities (SWDs). We draw on state-representative teacher, principal, and...

Tracing storytelling traditions from historic roots within Black cultures to contemporary fandom, this essay argues for more research and critique on the ways that today's Black fans engage in restorying, with implications for reader response theory, research in digital literacies, and Black studies.

Writing itself is important to examine in digitally connected spaces because it serves as one of the central ways people communicate and interact with each other. The method we outline in this paper brings together tools and frames from digital ethnography as well as visual arts and rhetoric in order to visually map emergent dimensions of youth's w...

Purpose Building on the growing interest in school-based “making” and “makerspaces,” this paper aims to map the emergence of a literacy-oriented makerspace in a non-selective urban public high school. It examines how competing conceptions of literacy came to be negotiated as students and teachers shaped this new space for literacy practice, and it...

Background/Context Researchers, policy makers, and practitioners are paying increasing attention to the educational opportunities afforded by the maker movement—a growing public interested in do-it-yourself designing, remixing, and tinkering using physical and digital tools. While education research on “making” has often focused on informal learnin...

This article explores the lived realities for young people growing up and learning in a climate of racial discrimination, religious intolerance, misogyny, and xenophobia, and how school-sponsored and school-supported uses of digital media can afford young people opportunities to navigate their experiences of social injustice and resist exclusionary...

This article examines the poetry writing practices of two teen girls through a world making lens—a writing approachthat critically centers youth experiences and identities.

In an effort to draw attention to the mobile dimensions of meaning making, this article proposes a pedagogy of transliteracies, supporting educators and learners in critically reflecting on how people, media, and things are connected across space and time. Expanding on the New London Group’s (1996) multiliteracies vision of communicative and ideolo...

At the forefront of current digital literacy studies in education, this Handbook uniquely systematizes emerging interdisciplinary themes, new knowledge, and insightful theoretical contributions to the field. The chapter topics-identified through academic conference networks, rigorous analysis, and database searches of trending themes-are organized...

This chapter is the inspiring introduction to the Handbook of Writing, Literacies and Education in Digital Cultures.

This article reviews scholarship on youth and young adult activism in digital spaces, as young users of participatory media sites are engaging in political, civic, social, or cultural action and advocacy online to create social change. The authors argue that youth’s digital activism serves as a central mechanism to disrupt inequality, and that educ...

This article introduces a transliteracies framework to conceptually account for the contingency and instability of literacy practices on the move and to offer a set of methodological tools for investigating these mobilities. Taking the paradox of mobility—the simultaneous restricting or regulation of movement that accompanies mobility—as its centra...

This article examines teachers’ participation in a global collaboration, an educational partnership connecting educators and students online. A challenge that emerged involved how to engage in and facilitate online interactions that made manifest participants’ conflicting beliefs and opinions, what I refer to as challenging conversations. To mediat...

In this essay, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas and Amy Stornaiuolo explore new trends in reader response for a digital age, particularly the phenomenon of bending texts using social media. They argue that bending is one form of restorying, a process by which people reshape narratives to represent a diversity of perspectives and experiences that are often mi...

This paper brings together resources of sociocultural literacy studies (Heath, 1983; Street, 1984; Barton, Hamilton, & Ivanic, 1999) and policy attribute analysis (Porter, Floden, Freeman, Schmidt, & Schwille, 1988) to examine how the meaning of “21st century skills/literacies” - as emphasized in recent college and career-readiness (CCR) standards...

This article takes up an area of central concern for educators in an era of global connectivity: how to account for the mobility of people, texts, and practices while simultaneously addressing persistent educational inequalities. In attending to the ways people participate in unequal globalized contexts, even educational contexts constructed to bri...

While connecting students and teachers in new configurations using digital technologies offers great promise for literacy and learning, this column considers the complexities of negotiating local and global literacies in global collaborations. It introduces the theoretical concept of scaling to highlight the ways teachers actively and strategically...

How are identities as cosmopolitan citizens realized in practice, and how can dialogue be fostered across differences in culture, language, ideology, and geography? More particularly, how might young people be positioned to develop effective and ethical responses, in our digital age, to local and global concerns? Such are the questions we addressed...

As social networks, mobile devices, and other information and communication technologies (ICTs) increasingly transform educational spaces, researchers are confronted with the dual challenge of investigating how these tools are changing the face of education while also trying to mediate the use of these tools in the research process itself.

This bibliography includes abstracts of selected empirical research studies as well as titles of other related studies and books published between summer 2012 and May 2013. Abstracts are only written for research studies that employed systematic analysis of phenomena using experimental, qualitative, ethnographic, discourse analysis, literary critic...

This study examined the construct of community and its development in online spaces through a qualitative analysis of middle school students' participation in a private social network. Drawing on notions of community inspired by philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, we found that students, despite not knowing one another previously, were willing both to enco...

This bibliography includes abstracts of selected empirical research studies as well as titles of other related studies and books published between summer 2011 and May 2012. Abstracts are only written for research studies that employed systematic analysis of phenomena using experimental, qualitative, ethnographic, discourse analysis, literary critic...

C alls now abound in a range of literatures—philosophy, education, sociology, anthropology, media studies—to reimagine citizenship and identity in ways befitting a global age. A concept predominant in many such calls is the ancient idea of "cosmopolitanism." Refashioned now to serve as a compass in a world that is at once radically interconnected a...

This article highlights the importance of rethinking literacy assessment in a digital and global world. Although pressures currently abound to narrow conceptions and practices of literacy, especially in an era of high stakes testing, digital multimodality and connectivity offer the potential for new ways of thinking, representing, and communicating...

Typescript. Microfiche copy available in Special Collections Dept. Thesis (M.A.)--San Francisco State University, 2005. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 109-114).