Andrea Leone-Pizzighella, Ph.D.

I am an educational linguist, a discourse analyst, and an ethnographer. I have taught and done research in a variety of educational contexts, as well as in digital spaces. I do research primarily with secondary school students and their teachers.

After my Bachelor's degree in Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, I won a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship and taught English (using CLIL and communicative approaches) at upper secondary schools in Rome. I then earned a Master's degree in Education Policy, followed by a Ph.D. in Educational Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. I am now concluding a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship at Eurac Research in Bozen-Bolzano. Here is my complete CV.

I grew up in the United States and have lived in Italy since 2019. I am actively involved in local schools, cultural associations, and volunteer work in the province of Verona.

To learn more about what linguistic ethnographers do, why it is important to do research in schools, and why it is important to listen to children when we do research, I invite you to read some of my blog posts below:

What does a linguistic ethnographer do? A linguistic ethnographer’s research tools (aside from pen and notebook) are not always evident. This post briefly explains these tools and how they can be used by anyone.

Don’t research participants act differently when they know you’re watching? In physics, the “observer effect” is seen as a problem. In social sciences, however, the observer is simply another person in the room. This post discusses how no social phenomena occur in isolation.

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Why is school an important site for ethnographic research? Schools are often seen as natural parts of everyday life. However, they are saturated with cultural peculiarities, social rituals, and locally specific linguistic displays which provide rich data poin...

What is “talking normal”?We all have preconceptions of “normal” speech. And, until someone tells us that our own speech is somehow “not normal”, we don’t often reflect on what “normal” means for us. What does “normal” mean fo...