Kris D. Gutiérrez

Professor, Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley

Kris D. Gutiérrez is Professor in the Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley. She was the Inaugural Provost’s Chair and Distinguished Professor of Learning Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder and Professor of Social Research Methodology at UCLA. Gutiérrez is a national leader in education, with an emphasis in literacy, learning sciences, and interpretive and design-based approaches to inquiry. Gutiérrez is a member of the National Academy of Education and was Past President of the American Educational Research Association. Gutiérrez was appointed by President Obama as a member of the National Board for the Institute of Education Sciences where she served as Vice-Chair. She serves on the National Research Council Committee on Strengthening Science Education through a Teacher Learning Continuum and on the Guiding the Implementation of PreK-12 Engineering Education Committee, National Academy of Engineering. Her empirical studies are funded by NSF and the MacArthur Foundation.

Her research examines learning in designed learning environments, with attention to students from nondominant communities and English Learners. Her work on Third Spaces examines the affordances of hybrid and syncretic approaches to literacy, new media literacies, and STEM learning and the re-mediation of functional systems of learning. Her work in social design experiments seeks to leverage students’ everyday concepts and practices to ratchet up expansive forms of learning. Professor Gutiérrez’s research has been published widely in premier academic journals and is a co-author of Learning and Expanding with Activity Theory.

Gutiérrez has received numerous awards for her empirical work, including the 2014, Distinguished Contributions to Social Contexts in Education Research – Lifetime Achievement Award and the 2014 Henry T. Trueba Award for Research Leading to the Transformation of the Social Contexts of Education, (Division G, AERA), the 2005 AERA Division C Sylvia Scribner Award for influencing the field of learning and instruction. She was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, an AERA and NEPC Fellow, and an Osher Fellow at the Exploratorium Museum of Science. She served on the U.S. Department of Education Reading First Advisory Committee and a member of President Obama’s Education Policy Transition Team. Professor Gutiérrez was also identified as one of the 2009 Top 100 influential Hispanics.

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