Ghiso received LRA’s first-ever Arthur Applebee Award for Excellence in Research on Literacy for her 2016 paper “The Laundromat as the Transnational Local: Young Children's Literacies of Interdependence,” published in Teachers College Record.

Along with co-authors Gerald Campano and Bethany Welch, Ghiso also received the Ed Fry Book Award for Partnering with Immigrant Communities: Action through Literacy (Teachers College Press 2016).

“Professor Ghiso is an outstanding scholar, teacher, and human, and receiving two awards for her scholarship in the same year from the premier literacy research organization is unprecedented,” said Ghiso’s colleague, Marjorie Siegel, Professor of Education.

Ghiso, who immigrated to the United States from Argentina as a young girl and was put in remedial courses at the American public school she attended, has long been interested in “how schools’ organization doesn’t tap into children’s linguistic and cultural resources.” She explores what she calls young immigrants’ “local cosmopolitanism” – their linguistic savvy and street-smart adaptability, born of uprooting and living in multiple cultures. Those experiences are “just as educative as a college year abroad or family vacations in Europe,” she says.

In Partnering with Immigrant Communities, Ghiso, Campano (a University of Pennsylvania education professor) and Welch (an authority on urban revitalization) detail the benefits of such “transnational exposure.” The book chronicles the Community Literacies Project, a church-based Philadelphia initiative where, the authors argue, exchanges among Indonesian, Vietnamese and Latino families about high school admissions and local health care resources involve sophisticated literacy and linguistic practices. The Project’s immigration workshops reflect African-American intellectual and activist legacies. Youth and families cooperate across cultural, social and linguistic boundaries to forge a shared vision of educational justice and human rights.

In “The Laundromat as the Transnational Local,” Ghiso considers how literacy curricula and education institutions in general might be reimagined to be more attuned with young people’s transnational experiences. The study, which is informed by Chicana and transnational feminist theories, examines how first grade Latina/o emergent bilinguals experienced a literacy curriculum that sought to value their transnational experiences and multilingual repertoires.

Published Thursday, Dec 7, 2017