Gerald Campano | University of Pennsylvania (original) (raw)

Papers by Gerald Campano

Research in the Teaching of English, Jan 31, 2017

Language arts, Nov 1, 2013

Review of Research in Education, Mar 1, 2009

Research in The Teaching of English, Feb 1, 2019

Research in the Teaching of English

To collaborate (from the Latin com and laborare) is to join together in labor, to fuse manifold t... more To collaborate (from the Latin com and laborare) is to join together in labor, to fuse manifold threads into a grander tapestry of becoming. We envision the future as collaborative: as the meeting of minds sparks ideas, as the synthesis of perspectives across difference creates avenues toward deepened understandings. This theme of collaboration emerges from reflections on our collective labor: as teachers, learners, scholars, and activists, we navigate multiple, intersecting, and mutually constitutive roles. We collaborate with students, colleagues, teachers, and community partners to conduct research, publish articles, present at conferences, teach classes, and facilitate workshops. Our efforts unfold across simultaneously spatial and temporal dimensions: we inhabit the interstices of pasts, presents, and futures, traversing social, cultural, personal, and political boundaries. Significantly, our collaborative pedagogies and practices come into being at the nexus of teaching and learning: by writing collaboratively, learners can encounter divergent ways of thinking, melding others' voices with their own to craft new possibilities and engender synergies greater than our individual contributions. Such is the power of collaboration: for it is in working together that we can generate knowledge and create change in our communities. For this issue's In Dialogue, we invited Maha Bali, Ashley S. Boyd, and Remi Kalir to reflect on the histories of collaborative reading and writing and to envision the futures of education research, teaching, and service. In continuing our commitments to equity, collectivities, and ways of knowing, we bring to the center of our discourse voices, ideas, perspectives, and experiences that have been placed in the margins. We invited the authors to collaboratively compose the In Dialogue using annotations to document their developing conversation. Through this shared discourse, the authors constellate insights into the intertwined dimensions of literacy-personal, cultural, historical, and political-and explore the transformative potential of writing collaboratively across cultural difference.

Research in the Teaching of English

As transborder crises like climate change and COVID-19 endure, children worldwide are at the fore... more As transborder crises like climate change and COVID-19 endure, children worldwide are at the forefront of our collective consciousness. In a 2020 policy brief, for example, the United Nations warned of the considerable impact of the pandemic on young people across the globe. Noting the ways in which children from diverse geographic locations are made "hyper-visible" in public discourses today (Fernandes & Garg, 2020), we find this moment an apt one to contemplate how the barriers facing those most vulnerable to systemic injustices transcend the immediacies of the present. While experiences of childhood vary worldwide, anchored by material realities as well as situated notions of "the child" proliferating in different social contexts (Wells, 2009), educational inequities-themselves shaped by racism, uneven geographic relations within and between world regions, and enduring imperial and colonial legacies-have long rendered schools "constraining and oppressive" places for Black children, Brown children, Indigenous children, and others marginalized along intersectional lines. Such disparities are further deepened by the centering of dominant childhoods across curricula, policy, and pedagogy as orienting models for who children (and what childhood itself) should be. Drawing on subaltern perspectives and critical understandings of place (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015) in the literacy field, we suggest that fixed notions of idealized and imperiled childhoods permeating educational systems worldwide predate current conditions and may yet outlast them; these undermine our ability not just to create a more equitable "geography of opportunity" for all children, as Tate (2008) might put it, but to imagine it as well. In this issue, we suggest that a commitment to the theme of childhoods across borders might renew our capacities to build and envision global conditions in which a plurality of childhoods might flourish. This signals our attention to the myriad experiences and constructions of childhoods across societies, and how these are rooted in socio-spatial contexts shaped both

Research in the Teaching of English

In a scene from the television series Lovecraft Country (Green & Sackheim, 2020), Letitia "Leti" ... more In a scene from the television series Lovecraft Country (Green & Sackheim, 2020), Letitia "Leti" Lewis calls the spirits of eight Black ancestors that have been trapped in her recently purchased home, along with the ghost of Hiram Epstein, their murderer. Hiram, the previous homeowner and a former scientist fired for "dangerous human experimentation," coordinated with the local police captain to capture, experiment, torture, and murder these eight Black residents in his home. As Hiram haunts and tries to harm Leti, she calls on these ancestors to help her cast Hiram away. "You are not dead yet. You can still fight," she proclaims as Hiram closes in on her. Leti and the ancestors circle around Hiram, hold hands, and chant a spell to cast him out. Their bloody and brutalized bodies, dismembered by Hiram's experimentation, become whole again in solidarity and strength. Hiram disintegrates. This scene is exemplary of both the Black Radical Tradition (Robinson, 2000)-the collection of customs, beliefs, and values through which Black people call out and disrupt individuals and systems of oppression that deny us humanity and dignity-and the recognition of a world system that is "dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide" (Robinson, 2000, foreword by Kelley, p. xiii; Stern & Hussain, 2015). In this scene, we witness the power of Black life (and Black afterlives) even in death, and the intergenerational forms of Black resistance exemplified by Leti and these ancestors against harm and indignity. While the show is steeped in science fiction, we recognize the parallels between the experimentation on and police brutality against Black people featured in this drama set in the 1950s and today's police in(action) and the handling of COVID-19 that disproportionately harms Black life. Yet in Lovecraft Country, we witness how the ancestors in Leti's home heal as they confront the harm they experienced and disintegrate their captor. As in this artistic scene in Lovecraft Country, this issue of RTE concludes with an In Dialogue essay by Gwendolyn Baxley and Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz that centers on the nexus of the Black Radical Tradition and healing through poetry. Poetry is a tool to speak truth to power, call out injustice, and envision new realities (Lorde, 2020; Neal, 1969). This essay highlights poetics as a means of healing, resisting,

Research in the Teaching of English

When this issue of Research in the Teaching of English goes live online or arrives in our hands, ... more When this issue of Research in the Teaching of English goes live online or arrives in our hands, many-if not all-of us will have been experiencing grief brought on by the global COVID-19 pandemic that has kept us in our homes, away from our families, our communities, and our students across the K-20 educational system. Unfortunately, we have collectively experienced loss, illness, and uncertainty during this time. We have witnessed infection and death rates disproportionately linked to Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities in the United States. We have lived to see how the hold of white supremacy still devastates BI-POC who bear the brunt of systemic injustices. During this period of isolation, anti-Black violence has brought many to protest the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, declaring that #BlackLivesMatter. We have heard loud voices denouncing the practice of detaining Latinx immigrant children and youth in cages. We have implored leaders to acknowledge anti-Asian rhetoric and hate crimes linking Asian communities to the origins of COVID-19. And our Indigenous communities have been overwhelmingly ignored in their need for much needed resources to combat COVID-19. Across the United States, and the globe, BIPOC have demanded justice, actively seeking coalition and solidarity within and across racial and ethnic communities. While it is easy to urge solidarity across racially and ethnically diverse groups, we must remember that these solidarities are not new phenomena. It is well documented that BIPOC communities have worked in solidarity through coalitional and intersectional movements for decades (

Research in the Teaching of English

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, we have often found ourselves struggling ... more Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, we have often found ourselves struggling to understand how to make meaning of the inexplicable. The contentious political response to the virus and our persistent failure to ensure educational equity are just two facets of the ekpyrosis-Greek for great conflagration-of the present. Other crises are evident in our work around the nation and the world: the climate emergency; the persistence of gun violence, war, and genocide; the mental health crisis among young people (and people of all ages); rampant inflation exacerbated by corporate greed; a lack of affordable and safe housing. These compounding factors make the present moment extraordinarily difficult for most-especially those in many of the communities where we teach, mentor, serve, and live. Stories have always been a way that humans make sense of the world during the most difficult times. Stories transmit a sense of who we are as humans living within this biosphere. The articles in this issue feature research on the ways young people create stories to make sense of their own lives and to imagine more equitable futures. In spite of the trauma and oppressive circumstances young people must navigate, they are also immensely creative. They read and write the self into existence, restorying narratives that erase, exclude, and mischaracterize them. If it is true, as Hannah Arendt once noted, that "storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it, that it brings about consent and reconciliation with things as they really are," then researching the role of stories (and restories) in the teaching of English can point the way toward cathartic hope. In the first article of this issue, "'It's Our Job as People to Make Others Feel Valued': Children Imagining More Caring and Just Worlds through Superhero Stories," Francisco Luis Torres highlights the agency of children making sense of ongoing societal conditions and imagining otherwise through the lens of their own superhero comics. Through co-teaching a fifth-grade literacy unit on superheroes

Research in the Teaching of English

A new decade is here, and with it persistent questions for the field of literacy studies. The fie... more A new decade is here, and with it persistent questions for the field of literacy studies. The field itself-through its programs, research agendas, journals, and professional associations-has been grappling with pressing societal issues and how to open new spaces for new ideas, with varying degrees of success (Toliver, Jones, Jiménez, Player, Rumenapp, & Munoz, 2019). To remain sustainable in the current times as a counternarrative (Mora, 2014) to policies and practices that perpetuate white supremacy and far-right ultranationalism, we need to decenter and decentralize our views of how we understand literacy as a global construct. This involves bringing to light efforts to retheorize it that are happening outside of traditional knowledge centers (Mora, 2016b). We need to recognize that overlooking certain regions of the world is detrimental to the literacy academic community at large, for our field cannot move forward if our frameworks for literacy are still ingrained with marginalizing views of different regions. When we talk about decentering and decentralizing as two related ideas, we emphasize the need to move the conversation away from historically dominant groups (decenter) and geographical locales (decentralize). Decentering and decentralizing means that, for example, we need to reconsider how many ideas and theories that we rely on stem from colonial knowledge centers in the Global North and Anglo communities (the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa, to a certain extent). This necessitates rethinking our relationship with the different languages at play in terms of knowledge production-such as the dominance of English. This shift in relationship implies, revisiting McLuhan, that English is a neutral medium to share messages coming from different parts of the world, but itself needs to be situated historically and

Research in the Teaching of English

Few things put the concept of scale into focus like a contagion: its ease of circulation and tran... more Few things put the concept of scale into focus like a contagion: its ease of circulation and transmission, and its indiscrimination, breach tenuous borders, calling into question boundaried conceptions of social worlds, identity politics, nationhood, and even humanity itself. Policy has often been positioned in English language arts (ELA) as a contagion or, at the very least, as exerting contagion-like force (Goodman, Calfee, & Goodman, 2014). Operating at macro-scales, policy (once enacted) transforms into a vector of potential, one that, through implementation, realizes values intended to shape vital aspects of human experience-most notably, our literate lives. At its best, literacy policy allows diverse literate practices to flourish, amplifying multiplicitous ways of knowing and being that eschew the narrow purview of much state-ordered testing in ELA. At its worst, however, policy erases this multiplicity, promoting sameness over difference in the name of pragmatics and accountability. Holding these truths together, we find ELA policy in the twenty-first century usefully conceptualized as a "pharmakon," an anodyne that is simultaneously poison and cure to a world already beset by social contagion (Aristotle, Phaedrus, trans. 2009; Derrida, 1981). To position policy as such-both poisonous and curative-is to foreground the vast potential of its indeterminate nature; it is to recognize, in policy's ambiguous status, an invitation to trace how the enactment and implementation of policy opens literacy research, teaching, and learning to the following question: What will literacy policy do to and for us in the twenty-first century? In a world newly beset by a literal contagion, policy has again captured global attention. COVID-19 has demonstrated, on one hand, the need for policy, for enactments of shelter-in-place orders and the passage of stimulus packages, each intended to infuse vitality into a global community in crisis. On the other hand, however, that same contagion has revealed policy's indeterminate and, furthermore, arbitrary nature. In the United States, educational testing-once so integral to the country's understanding of student growth and national accountability-has become, quite suddenly, waivable. As expressed by US Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in her March 20, 2020 "key policy letter,"

Research in the Teaching of English

Reading and English language arts function as a primary curricular space for "political intervent... more Reading and English language arts function as a primary curricular space for "political interventions, struggles over the formation of ideologies and beliefs, identities and capital" (Luke, 2004, p. 86). For example, one urgent political intervention involves racial equity. Numerous literary texts provide opportunities for dialogue about race in our society. Novels like Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, plays like Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, and the work of poets like Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou have been part of high school English curricula in many districts and states for nearly a generation. However, in recent times, even this expanded canon has faced challenges from multiple fronts: the imperatives of neoliberal educational reform; corporate standardized testing that prioritizes "testable" curriculum; learning standards that squeeze out stories in favor of informational texts; and even the demands of critical and radical educators who, in efforts to further decolonize education, call multicultural classics into question, advocating instead for the teaching of literature that is more relevant to contemporary students' lives. When teaching literature for youth and young adults, many educators do so with the intent of creating ethical and literate citizens for a global society. Furthermore, in addition to the diversification of the literature that young people read, as the demographics of our classrooms, schools, and society shift, the application of critical lenses that are multicultural, diverse, decolonizing, and humanizing to all texts for youth and young adults will become even more essential (Botelho & Rudman, 2009). Some students of the social media generation are bringing their own critical lenses into our courses, while others are invested in nostalgia and more traditional ways of reading texts. Increasingly, there have been generational rifts, informed by social media, regarding which texts to use in the curriculum and how to teach them. As instructors of students coming from many different perspectives, it is our task to encourage discursive pluralism, even if this means leaning into pedagogies of discomfort (Boler & Zembylas, 2003). We do this in hopes that creative tension around the selection, evaluation, and teaching of literature will, as Dr. King noted in his famous letter from a Birmingham jail, lead to equity, justice, and social change.

Research in the Teaching of English

As we write this introduction to our inaugural issue of Research in the Teaching of English, yout... more As we write this introduction to our inaugural issue of Research in the Teaching of English, youth in the United States and beyond are marching in protest of gun violence in the wake of the tragic killing of fourteen students and three staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. From what is being labeled "The March for Our Lives," powerful images of literacy are being circulated across the media, one of the most poignant of which has been Emma González's speech in Washington, DC. In front of a crowd of hundreds of thousands, González, a Parkland survivor, drew on rhetorical and oratory traditions of dissent to memorialize and humanize her peers who had been killed by naming them individually and emphasizing the absolute finitude of their lives cut short. González then mobilized silence-an arresting and reverberating 4 minutes and 26 seconds of silence-to invite the audience into the terror of the mass shooting and appeal to the collective conscience of those who might choose life over profits. The March for Our Lives resonates with other social movements of our turbulent and divisive social moment-most notably, Black Lives Matter, the Women's March, the #MeToo movement, the immigrant rights movement, and Standing Rock-all addressing longstanding systemic violence and oppression and new permutations of racism, xenophobia, and exploitation. These visible and collective public efforts to mobilize change and address injustice leverage many decades of work by communities and youth, particularly young people of color like March for Our Lives speaker Naomi Wadler, to call attention to pervasive gun violence and its intersections with racism, poverty, and domestic violence. They are also connected to legacies of protest and social activism that extend back through human history. While the current climate may feel unprecedented in some ways, the images of marches and student-led movements scrolling on our TV screens and digital media devices remind us of the importance of looking back into history to see both its resonances in the present and how it might instruct us for the future. We can look, for instance, to the first issues of RTE published 50 years ago, in the late 1960s, during another momentous and turbulent time in modern history. It was a period punctuated by ongoing turmoil: the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., which sparked uprisings in over 100 cities; the assassination of Robert F.

Research in the Teaching of English

One of the most challenging and distressing art installations at an exhibition entitled-from Rich... more One of the most challenging and distressing art installations at an exhibition entitled-from Richard Wright via Isabel Wilkerson-The Warmth of Other Suns: Stories of Global Displacement is a short video called "Wonderland," by the Turkish artist Erkan Özgen (2019). Recently housed in Washington DC's The Phillips Collection, "Wonderland" stands out-in an exhibition already filled with difficult and compelling work-for its arresting capacity to represent the horrors of war, violence, and death that often cause human movement and dislocation. The video depicts a Yazidi child, Muhammed, providing a graphic testimony of the ISIS occupation of his town in Syria, and the ensuing torture and murder of its population. Presumably because the child is deaf, the testimony is communicated not in written or spoken words, but somatically through gesture, sign language, and vocalization. Certain aspects of "Wonderland" resonate with current trends in literacy scholarship. As increasing numbers of researchers in our field attempt to integrate more creative forms of multimodal inquiry (like film) into their methodologies, they may draw inspiration from artists such as Özgen. The work also speaks to the value of incorporating somatic or embodied (e.g., Perry & Medina, 2015) and emotional modes (e.g., Lewis & Crampton, 2016) into both our understandings of literacy and human migration and how, invariably, literacy educators will have to grapple with trauma and human precarity in their sites of practice (e.g., Dutro, 2019). We may also make transnational connections to the ways in which, in the context of the United States, the audio of detained/imprisoned children crying for their parents alerted a more general population to the horrors of family separation and violence toward immigrants of color. Both the examples of "Wonderland" and the leaked audio of crying from the detention center move us away from the spoken or written word as the principal means of communication, enriching our understandings of literacy and, in so doing, raising our critical consciousness about oppression in ways that might spur additional organizing and action. Finally, "Wonderland" and the broader exhibition of The Warmth of Other Suns serves as a poignant reminder of the role that literacy plays in reinforcing political and cultural boundaries. Beyond these many connections, "Wonderland"-the artwork, not Muhammed's actual testimony-raises important issues that may be useful for literacy

Urban Education

This article draws from a decade-long community-based research partnership oriented toward learni... more This article draws from a decade-long community-based research partnership oriented toward learning from and supporting immigrant youth and families as they advocate for themselves in the face of educational inequity. In particular, we focus on examining the trajectory and insights of the partnership in light of ongoing educational, health, and sociopolitical crises during the pandemic and the racial uprisings against police violence. We sought to understand how the work shifted in response to these global crises and also what sustained our collaboration during these times. As we showcase through representative examples of our inquiries, members of different immigrant communities in our partnership drew on their individual and collective experiences to engage in research as an act of care, to address pragmatic and immediate needs in their schooling, and to contend with traumatic legacies of oppression. Expanding networks of care and the intellectual legacy of the collaboration itsel...

Research in the Teaching of English, Jan 31, 2017

Language arts, Nov 1, 2013

Review of Research in Education, Mar 1, 2009

Research in The Teaching of English, Feb 1, 2019

Research in the Teaching of English

Urban Education

This paper focused on our collaborative work with the Indonesian parish at St. Thomas Aquinas, co... more This paper focused on our collaborative work with the Indonesian parish at St. Thomas Aquinas, consisting of approximately 35 refugee families that have been in the U.S. for approximately eight to ten years. We recounted how the combination of community funds of knowledge (González, N., Moll, L., and Amanti, C., 2005) and organizational skills supported by our professional knowledge seemed to develop organically into a participatory action research project (Kemmis, S. and McTaggart, R., 2005) around the overarching research question: “How do immigrant parents support their children’s education?” We asked parents to raise questions and recount their experiences with the American educational system as well as to identify ways we could assist. The parents opted to develop a workshop for Indonesian families on the public high school admissions process, a critical gate-keeping mechanism for college admissions. Our data collection was based primarily on audio recordings and transcripts of parent meetings, interviews, or focus groups; field notes; and archival document review. Our theoretical frameworks included “inquiry as stance,” Freierean pedagogy, post structural realist theory, and critical social theory in the traditions of Bourdieu and Foucault. Aligning ourselves with feminist research methodology, we strove to be constantly aware of our positionality and reflexivity; to be collaborative and reciprocal in our relationship to community members; and to be truthful in our representation of our community collaborators and the research project. Other researchers and community workers may find useful the strategies and methods we employed to minimize distance between researcher and community; to build group self-reliance; and to develop a university-community partnership based on the principles of mutual respect, mutual benefit, and egalitarianism.

We approach the invitation of this handbook chapter-to discuss multimodality in reading research-... more We approach the invitation of this handbook chapter-to discuss multimodality in reading research-with an acknowledgment that multimodal frameworks have a long history and numerous intellectual lineages that precede their influence in literacy studies. By "put[ting] images, gestures , music, movement, animation, and other representational modes on equal footing with language" (Siegel, 2006, p. 65), multimodal lenses offer an avenue for re-reading "literacy" beyond school-based notions of reading and writing, and underscore how individuals and collect-ivities mobilize literacy practices within and across specific contexts and in relation to power asymmetries. They also invite us to look forward, to consider how phenomena such as trans-national migration, global neoliberal policies, and activist movements of resistance might be aligned with, and inform, the next phase of multimodal literacy research. One of the well-established contributions of multimodality to reading research is a more expansive understanding of what constitutes a text (

Handbook of Reading Research, Volume V, 2020

We approach the invitation of this handbook chapterto discuss multimodality in reading researchwi... more We approach the invitation of this handbook chapterto discuss multimodality in reading researchwith an acknowledgment that multimodal frameworks have a long history and numerous intellectual lineages that precede their influence in literacy studies. By "put[ting] images, gestures, music, movement, animation, and other representational modes on equal footing with language" (Siegel, 2006, p. 65), multimodal lenses offer an avenue for re-reading "literacy" beyond school-based notions of reading and writing, and underscore how individuals and collectivities mobilize literacy practices within and across specific contexts and in relation to power asymmetries. They also invite us to look forward, to consider how phenomena such as transnational migration, global neoliberal policies, and activist movements of resistance might be aligned with, and inform, the next phase of multimodal literacy research.