Wenyu Guo, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Literacy Studies 

Literacies that live across borders

I am a qualitative researcher, teacher educator, and former language teacher in China and the United States, and I came to this work as an immigrant, transnational, and multilingual person myself. My research is interdisciplinary, critical, and participatory: I study the translingual, transcultural, transnational, and racial experiences of im/migrant children, youth, and educators in literacy learning, instruction, and assessment, with the aim of unsettling the monolingual, monocultural, and monoracial assumptions that keep schools from reaching underserved young people.

What I try to hold onto is that families already carry what schools are looking for. Knowledge accumulated and sustained across borders is usually read in classrooms as a gap; I study it as a fund of knowledge, and as a counternarrative to straight-line stories of migration and assimilation.

Much of the work happens in one place over a long time. In 2019 I co-founded a community book club with a Chinese heritage language school in Columbia, South Carolina, its parent community, and a faculty colleague, and read with the same children week after week for four years. Sustained presence in a community is where I think this field learns most.

That commitment continues in Tampa, where I work with the local Chinese and Asian American community, collaborate with Rising Asian American Youth (RAAY) on youth empowerment, and take part in NAAAP’s professional and mentoring networks. Research–practice partnerships with community organizations are not an outreach add-on to my scholarship; they are where the questions come from.

Wenyu Guo
Wenyu Guo, Ph.D. (she/her/hers)
Assistant Professor, Literacy Studies
University of South Florida, Tampa
Where to find me
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Research focus

Transnational and translingual literacies

Im/migrant youth are often positioned in U.S. classrooms as language learners or as culturally mismatched, and the knowledge their families build across borders goes unseen. I study those transnational funds of knowledge as counternarratives, and treat children’s literature of transnationalism as a subgenre in its own right.

AsianCrit-informed racial literacy

Working from Asian critical race theory and research–practice partnerships in Columbia and Tampa, I develop a racial literacy framework and a practical toolbox for educators: facing history, naming oppressions, critical self-examination, and building racially conscious spaces with young people.

Children’s and adolescent literature

Critical content analysis of Asian and Asian American picturebooks and graphic novels, and work with pre-service teachers on reading those texts through a critical literacy lens and carrying that reading into their classrooms.

Ethical, equitable, and culturally responsive AI in K–12

A pillar of my current research addresses an urgent national challenge: the AI literacy gap and escalating burnout in the U.S. educational workforce. Unguided deployment of generative AI risks widening achievement gaps and perpetuating algorithmic bias against culturally and linguistically diverse students. This work targets teacher professional development, establishing scalable, evidence-based frameworks that integrate culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy with critical AI literacy.

Research interests

Racial and transnational literacies Bilingual and multilingual education Asian American studies Children’s and young adult literature Teacher education Critical and culturally responsive AI literacy

Awards and fellowships

Selected.

2024–2026
Early Career Educator of Color Leadership Fellow

National Council of Teachers of English. A two-year national mentoring fellowship; six fellows are selected each year.

2025
Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching and Mentoring Award

University of South Florida, Tampa.

2023
Outstanding International Graduate Student Award

University of South Carolina. Also Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Assistant Award, 2023.

2020
Terry & Scott Peterson Fellowship

Awarded to one student a year for advancing K–12 opportunity by strengthening community and racial connections.

2020
Graduate Civic Scholars Program

An interdisciplinary fellowship selecting six graduate students a year; one of two awardees from the College of Education.

2020
Outstanding Achievement and Student Triumph Award

University of South Carolina, for service.

Scholarship
Publications, grants, talks, service

What each study asked and what it addresses, with links to the journals.
Current project
Children’s literature of transnationalism

A critical content analysis of 69 picturebooks, with the full annotated corpus.
Community
Bubble-Up Book Club

Four years of Sunday afternoons with Chinese American children in Columbia, South Carolina.

Scholarship

Peer-reviewed publications, funded and submitted grants, upcoming talks, and service to the profession and the university.

Publications Grants Talks Service

Publications

Selected refereed articles and chapters, most recent first.

Educational Researcher · 2026

Bringing language to AsianCrit: Introducing a Challenging Linguistic Racism tenet

Chu, Y., Tian, Z., & Guo, W. (2026). Educational Researcher.
Impact factor 5.5 · h-index 167

An extension of Asian critical race theory through a raciolinguistic lens, arguing that racial hierarchy and linguistic dominance are inseparable in shaping how Asian and Asian American communities are racialized, and how they resist.

What it addresses: it names language ideology as both a mechanism of marginalization and a site of resistance, and defines a new AsianCrit tenet with implications for research, policy, and practice.

Read in the journal →
English Teaching: Practice & Critique · 2026Lead author

Cultivating critical racial consciousness in dual language bilingual education: A participatory design of Asian American biliteracy lessons

Guo, W., Tian, Z., & Stemme, M. (2026). English Teaching: Practice & Critique.
Impact factor 1.2 · h-index 59

A one-year participatory study with two bilingual teachers in a middle school Chinese–English dual language program in Cambridge, Massachusetts, co-designing an antiracist Chinese Language Arts curriculum through AsianCrit and translanguaging.

What it addresses: it shows what racially and linguistically responsive pedagogy looks like in practice when students’ full communicative repertoires are treated as legitimate.

Read in the journal →
Language, Culture and Curriculum · 2026

Racing across borders: Transnational racial literacies of Chinese heritage language school teachers

Chu, Y., Guo, W., Sun, Y., & Yu, M. (2026). Language, Culture and Curriculum, 1–17.
Impact factor 2.8 (2025) · h-index 53

How teachers in a Chinese heritage language school make sense of race across two national contexts, and how that understanding shapes what they teach.

What it addresses: it locates racial literacy in the heritage school, a community site usually left out of studies of racial learning.

Read in the journal →
Education Science · conditionally accepted Lead author

Literacies of transnational youth of Color: A critical review of research

Guo, W., Smith, P., Stemme, M., Patterson, D., & Han, S. (conditionally accepted). Education Science.
Impact factor 3.0 · h-index 88

A critical interpretive systematic review of studies from 2000 to 2024, framed by intersectionality-informed critical race theory, examining how race and racialization legitimize or delegitimize im/migrant students’ literacies.

What it addresses: it proposes three reorientations for literacy research — from literacy to literacies, from individual to structural, and from local to transnational.

Teachers College Record · 2025 Sole authored

Transnational funds of knowledge as counternarratives: Chinese students respond to multicultural children’s literature

Guo, W. (2025). Teachers College Record, 127(9–10), 37–66.
Impact factor 1.9 · h-index 111

Drawing on a broadened conceptualization of transnational funds of knowledge and on critical race methods, this study follows Chinese American children reading multicultural children’s literature and shows how they mobilize family knowledge built across borders as counternarrative.

What it addresses: it treats transnational literacy as a dynamic ecosystem rather than a deficit, and reimagines children’s literature of transnationalism as a subgenre that resists linear accounts of migration.

Read in the journal →
Australian Journal of Language and Literacy · 2025 International

“This is like a mirror! That’s like me!” Differentiated literature mirrors for diverse children

Boutte, G. S., Adam, H., López-Robertson, J., Guo, W., & Jackson-Barnett, L. (2025). Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 48, 283–299.

A cross-national collaboration examining how Aboriginal, African American, Latino/a, and Asian children’s literatures work as mirrors, in distinct but connected ways.

What it addresses: it treats the mirror metaphor as differentiated rather than universal, and asks what each community’s literature is actually doing.

Read in the journal →
Edward Elgar · 2025 Book chapter

“U.S. and China can be friends for once”: Immigrant children engage in transnational literature in a community-based book club

Guo, W., & Sun, Y. (2025). In P. Edwards, C. Compton-Lilly, & G. Li (Eds.), The International Handbook of Literacies in Families and Communities (pp. 186–205).

Children in the book club read transnational literature together and talk their way through geopolitics, family history, and their own place between two countries.

What it addresses: it documents a community space that schools rarely provide, and what becomes sayable there.

Read the chapter →
Journal of Children’s Literature · 2024

Fostering Student Activism: Addressing Anti-Asian Racism through Children’s Literature in a Community-Based Book Club

Guo, W. (2024). The Journal of Children’s Literature, 50(2), 25–37.

Chinese American children read about anti-Asian racism and move from recognition toward action in their own school and community.

What it addresses: it offers teachers a concrete route from a picturebook discussion to student activism.

Read the article →
Bilingual Research Journal · 2023

“That’s my mission”: Examining parents’ investments in their emergent bilingual learners’ development

Sanchez, L., Bauer, E., Wang, Y., Guo, W., Hao, L., & Hwang, K. (2023). Bilingual Research Journal, 46(3–4), 224–238.
Impact factor 1.2 · h-index 51

A study of how parents of emergent bilingual children invest time, language, and effort in their children’s development, in their own words.

What it addresses: it counters the assumption that immigrant parents are uninvolved, showing sustained investment that schools often do not recognize.

Read in the journal →
The Reading Teacher · 2022

A content analysis of Chinese American contemporary realistic fiction books

Wang, Y., Guo, W., & Sui, X. (2022). The Reading Teacher, 76(2), 159–168.
Impact factor 1.5 · h-index 66

A critical content analysis of nearly forty contemporary picturebooks representing Chinese Americans and diasporic cultures.

What it addresses: it found many portrayals utopian and depoliticized, with school life — the center of children’s daily experience — largely absent.

Read in the journal →

Also published, accepted, and in press

  • Banack, A., Nam, R., & Guo, W. (conditionally accepted). Reading girlhood: Representations of Asian American youth in contemporary graphic novels. Research on Diversity in Youth Literature.
  • Xu, N., Tian, Z., & Guo, W. (accepted). Examining translanguaging discourses in Mandarin–English dual language immersion classrooms: A three-site inquiry. L2 Journal, Berkeley Language Center.
  • Guo, W. (2024). Interrogating anti-Asian racism: Children’s literature as a nexus for antiracist education. WOW Stories, 11(1), 4–13.
  • Wang, Y., Sánchez, L., Bauer, E., Guo, W., Hao, L., & Hwang, K. (2023). A new language, a new culture, and a new way of thinking. In V. Lee & K. Lewis (Eds.), Advancing Culturally Responsive and Socially Just Approaches to Multilingual Family–School Partnerships. Lexington Books.
  • Guo, W. (2024). Review: Language is a superpower, a zine by Chinese for Affirmative Action. Bilingual Research Journal, 47(4), 567–569. Link
  • Guo, W. (2023). Second reaction: The fearless flights of Hazel Ying Lee. First Opinions, Second Reactions, 16(1). Link
  • Kuther, T. L., & Morgan, R. D. (2014). Careers in Psychology (4th ed.) (X. Wang & W. Guo, Trans.). China Labor Society Security Publishing House.

Grants

Funded projects and proposals in review.

Funded · 2026 · $15,000

Cultivating AI-Literate Educators for Ethical, Equitable, and Culturally Responsive AI Integration in K–12 Literacy Instruction

Principal Investigator, with P. Bo (Co-PI). USF College of Education New Researcher Grant.

Prepares literacy teachers to bring generative AI into instruction without reproducing cultural and linguistic bias.

Funded · 2026 · $8,500

Building Educators’ AI Competency Nationwide — AmplifyLearn.AI

Co-Principal Investigator, with P. Bo (PI) and S. Park. University of Washington AmplifyGAIN Center.

Builds national capacity for educators to use AI critically and equitably.

Funded · 2024 · $5,000

Fostering Multiracial Solidarity through Antiracist Translanguaging Pedagogy

Co-Principal Investigator, with Z. Tian (PI). ACTFL Research Priorities Grant.

A year-long participatory design of an antiracist Chinese Language Arts curriculum in a Chinese immersion program.

Funded · 2020 · $2,900

Between Two Worlds: Asian American Children (Re)negotiate Bicultural Identities through Culturally Relevant Children’s Literature

Principal Investigator. SPARC Graduate Research Grant.

Seed funding for the book club study that became the dissertation.

Under review · 2025 · $12,000

Building Family–Community–Researcher Partnerships: Confronting Xenophobia Through Co-Designed Anti-Oppressive Curriculum and Pedagogies

Principal Investigator, with Y. Chu (Co-PI). USF New Research Grant.

Resubmission planned · Summer 2026 · $75,000

Fostering an Asian (American) Antiracist Curriculum through Participatory Methods

Principal Investigator, with T. Qiu (Co-PI). Spencer Foundation Racial Equity Grant. Highly rated in 2024; resubmission strongly encouraged by reviewers.

Upcoming talks and presentations

2026 season.

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Service

Editorial, international, national, university, and program service.

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Teaching

Teaching is a sociocultural and sociopolitical practice. In a system still stratified by whose identities and ideologies count as normal, teacher educators carry a responsibility to prepare teachers who are critically conscious and actively antiracist, and who can teach from the strengths of every learner.

My approach is assets-based before it is anything else. Students’ languages, family histories, and community literacies are the material we teach with, not obstacles to work around. Guided by critical race theory, multiliteracies, translanguaging, and intersectionality, I help pre-service and practicing teachers select texts, design curriculum, and teach through culturally sustaining, equity-driven practice.

In my undergraduate and graduate classrooms I try to build spaces that are safe, brave, and caring: sustained communal dialogue, students’ own narratives and lived literacies honored as knowledge, and critical literacy developed through the work of creators from historically minoritized communities.

What students do in my courses

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Courses taught

Undergraduate and graduate, at the University of South Florida and the University of South Carolina.

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What students say

From anonymous end-of-course evaluations and midterm surveys.

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Screenshot of anonymous instructor comments from a course evaluation report
Instructor comments as they appear in the course evaluation report, unedited.

What colleagues observed

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Mentoring

I grew as a critical qualitative researcher through collaborative inquiry and (fem)mentorship, and I mentor the way I was mentored: weekly time, real projects, and co-authorship rather than errands. Mentoring is relational work, and for international and first-generation students it also means helping them find their footing in an unfamiliar system.

I currently mentor four doctoral students — three in Literacy Studies and one in Educational Technology — and serve as major professor for one of them. With him I meet weekly, planned his program of study, connected him with a local Chinese heritage language school as a research site, and brought him into ongoing projects, which has produced scholarship proposals and conference presentations.

Three doctoral students have worked with me as research assistants on research agenda development, timelines, literature reviews, data analysis, and scholarly writing. Two have since finished their assistantships, and we still publish together. I have also supervised two undergraduate students on a study of children’s literature and racial justice, which they are preparing to present at a conference.

I especially welcome students with historically marginalized identities who want to become independent scholars — critical, creative, thoughtful, and intentional.

“Dr. Guo was available to support my work through regular feedback and advice, acting as both my cheerleader and constructive thinking partner. I gained a tremendous amount of knowledge working for her during a relatively short period of time. Though I no longer work as her research assistant, we are still collaborating to complete projects we began during our time together as co-authors.”

Margaret Robertson Stemme, former graduate research assistant, 2024–2025
Work we published together
  • Guo, W., Tian, Z., & Stemme, M. (2026). Cultivating critical racial consciousness in dual language bilingual education. English Teaching: Practice & Critique.
  • Guo, W., Smith, P., Stemme, M., Patterson, D., & Han, S. (conditionally accepted). Literacies of transnational youth of Color: A critical review of research. Education Science.
  • Guo, W., Smith, P., Stemme, M., Patterson, D., & Han, S. (2025). Literacies of transnational students of Color: A critical review of research. National Council of Teachers of English Annual Convention, Denver, CO; and Literacy Research Association 75th Annual Conference, Las Vegas, NV.

“As a new doctoral student, I felt pretty excited to start a new journey but also experienced the pressure of learning in a totally unfamiliar environment. The independent study with Dr. Guo helps me clear up confusions and worries and engage myself with academic life as a PhD student.”

Pengju Guan, doctoral advisee, independent study reflection, Fall 2024

Teaching awards and professional learning

I share assignment descriptions, activities, and textbooks with colleagues, co-revised two course curricula, and have presented on my teaching methods in professional development workshops at the National Council of Teachers of English for the past three years.

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Certificate →

For teachers and families

Materials you can use directly: booklists, lesson ideas, and writing addressed to educators and parents rather than to researchers.

Booklist
69 picturebooks on transnationalism →

Filterable by transnational practice, heritage community, and age, with a printable table view.

Written for teachers
Children’s literature and antiracist teaching
Fostering Student Activism: Addressing Anti-Asian Racism through Children’s Literature in a Community-Based Book Club (2024) Interrogating anti-Asian racism: Children’s literature as a nexus for antiracist education (2024)
Running a book club
Starting a community book club

How our club was organized, plus guides I recommend to heritage schools and families getting started.

Downloads
Lesson plans and curricula

Materials from the Asian American biliteracy lessons we co-designed with bilingual teachers. Coolies by Yin and Chris Soentpiet anchors the unit.

We translated the picturebook ourselves and pitched the language to the Chinese proficiency of fifth graders in a Chinese immersion classroom.

Where else to look for books

Organizations and booklists I return to when selecting texts.

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Media and public engagement

Press, interviews, recorded talks, and community events.

USF College of Education News · September 13, 2024

Dr. Wenyu Guo Selected as an Awardee by the NCTE Early Career Educator of Color Leadership Program

On the two-year national fellowship, the ECEOC Summer Institute in Washington, D.C., and the community-engaged participatory project on how Asian American children and their parents learn and unlearn about race together.

Read the story →
Wenyu Guo in a roundtable discussion with her NCTE leadership scholar cohort
With the ECEOC leadership scholar cohort at the Summer Institute, Washington, D.C.
Wenyu Guo Grace Lin
Wenyu Guo (left) in conversation with Grace Lin (right). Grace Lin photograph courtesy of Little Brown.
Author interview

Reclaiming Joy, Disrupting Tropes, and Advancing Critical Pedagogy with Grace Lin

A conversation with Newbery Honor author and illustrator Grace Lin about joy, the tropes children’s literature keeps repeating, and what critical pedagogy asks of authors and teachers alike.

I conducted the interview as Co-Chair of the Author Breakfast for the Children’s Literature Assembly, National Council of Teachers of English. Sponsored by Little, Brown, Grace Lin’s publisher.

Read the interview →

Webinars

Poster for the Reimagining Literacy Education webinar, David C. Anchin Center
May 1, 2024 · David C. Anchin Center for the Advancement of Teaching, in partnership with the USF Literacy Studies program

Reimagining Literacy Education: Empowering Minoritized Voices and Diverse Perspectives

As the world grapples with the aftermath of the pandemic, researchers and educators face the task of reassessing and reshaping literacy education. The webinar centered four minoritized literacies in order to bring them into the research landscape, and discussed strategies for preparing teachers for a diverse student population.

Panel: Wenyu Guo, Susan Bennett, Julia López-Robertson, Helen Adam, Eliza Braden, and Sohyun An. Free and open to the public.
Poster for the 2023 CLA Student Committee webinar
July 12, 2023 · Children’s Literature Assembly Student Committee, National Council of Teachers of English

Disrupting Monolingually Oriented Praxis: Children’s Literature as a Nexus for Translanguaging and Social Justice Pedagogies

The Children’s Literature Assembly Student Committee’s annual webinar, with over thirty attendees from the United States, Canada, and beyond.

Panel: Angie Zapata, Laura Ascenzi-Moreno, Wenyu Guo, and Grace Enriquez. The recording is available to CLA members through the CLA website.

Invited session posters

AERA 2024, Philadelphia.

Poster for the AERA 2024 invited session Amplifying Diasporan Literacies
Amplifying Diasporan Literacies in Educational Research and Teaching — International Relations Committee invited session, AERA 2024. Chair: Gloria S. Boutte. Discussant: Joyce E. King.
Poster for the AERA 2024 symposium Disrupting the Single Story
Disrupting the Single Story: Transformative Children’s Literature for Social Justice — AERA 2024 symposium, co-chaired with Laxmi Prasad Ojha. Discussant: Catherine Compton-Lilly.
Critical content analysis · in progress

Children’s literature of transnationalism

This corpus was assembled and coded for a critical content analysis conducted by Dr. Wenyu Guo, Dr. Rong Zhang, and Dr. Yuechen Sun. Across 69 picturebooks with transnational content, the study asks how im/migrant children and families continue to live through relationships connecting here and there, how the knowledge produced within those relationships shapes their lives in the present, and how it reorients the dominant narrative of straight-line im/migration, assimilation, and racialization.

The corpus below is ordered by publication year, most recent first, and alphabetically within year. Award and honor information appears only where a named award is recorded in the corpus spreadsheet. Transnational practice and TFoK categories are nonexclusive and reflect first-cycle coding, so a book may appear under several categories.

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Title Year Author / Illustrator Ages Heritage Transnational practices
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Community-engaged project · 2019–2022

Bubble-Up Book Club

A non-profit, culturally sustaining book club I co-founded in 2019 with a Chinese heritage language school in Columbia, South Carolina, its parent community, and a faculty colleague. For four years it ran weekly, one hour on Sunday afternoons, reading Asian American children’s literature with local im/migrant children and youth.

The club gave children an “other space” — no mandated curriculum, no test pressure — in which to say things about race, language, and family that are normally silenced in the classroom. It also became the site of my longitudinal practitioner-inquiry dissertation on Chinese American students’ engagement with multicultural literature through AsianCrit and multimodal literacies.

Books are mirrors and windows: they reflect who children are, and show them someone different.

2019
co-founded with the heritage school and parent community
4 years
of weekly Sunday sessions, 2019–2022
36+
picturebooks and graphic novels read together
1 hr
every Sunday, 3:30–4:30 pm
Writing from the club

The book club is the site for several published studies.

What we read

Asian American children’s literature, age-appropriate graphic novels, and picturebooks on immigration history and lived experience.

See the transnationalism corpus →
Starting one

If you are a teacher, parent, or heritage school considering a book club, I am glad to share materials and talk it through.

Children and facilitators reading together at the first book club meeting
2019.01 — the first book club meeting.
Children, parents, and facilitators of the Chinese Reading Club at the last class of the year
2019.12 — the last class of the year.
A read-aloud in the book club, children seated in a circle around the facilitator
A read-aloud, with the semester’s themes on the screen behind.
Children reading picturebooks on their own during a book club session
Independent reading time.
Book club session with picturebooks and writing materials laid out on the tables
Books and writing materials set out before a session.
A stack of Asian American picturebooks used in the book club
Some of the picturebooks we read together.

Contact me

I am glad to hear from teachers, families, heritage schools, prospective students, and colleagues looking for collaborators. Email is the surest way to reach me.

Office
Department of Language, Literacy, Ed.D., Exceptional Education, and Physical Education
College of Education
University of South Florida, Tampa
USF faculty page →
Prospective doctoral students

Tell me what you want to study and why. I especially welcome students working on transnational and racial literacies, Asian American education, bilingual education, and children’s literature.

Teachers, schools, and families

If you are starting a book club, choosing texts, or planning professional development, write to me. I am glad to share materials and talk it through.

Speaking and collaboration

For invited talks, webinars, and research–practice partnerships, please include dates and audience in your first email.