Kris Gutierrez

Kris D. Gutiérrez is Associate Dean of the Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley. She is also the Carol Liu Professor of Education and brings expertise in the learning sciences, literacy, educational policy, and qualitative and design-based approaches to inquiry. Gutiérrez is an elected member of the National Academy of Education and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Board of Directors of the National Academy of Education and the International Society of the Learning Sciences, and past president of the American Educational Research Association. Gutiérrez held a presidential appointment from President Obama to the National Board for the Institute of Education Sciences, where she served as Vice Chair.

Gutiérrez’s research employs a critical approach to the Learning Sciences and to Cultural Historical Activity Theory, examining the cultural dimensions of learning in designed learning environments, with attention to students and families from non-dominant and translingual communities. For example, her work on Third Spaces examines the affordances of syncretic approaches to literacy and learning, new media literacies, STEM learning, and the re-mediation of functional systems of learning. Her work in social design-based experiments (SDBEs) foregrounds the historical, political, and ethical dimensions of design research and our theories of learning. Gutiérrez developed this new design methodology as a democratizing form of inquiry that seeks to make the design experimentation process a co-construction between different institutional stakeholders and communities.

Key examples of longstanding collaborations with immigrant and migrant communities include Las Redes, a 15-year long after-school afterschool program that privileged translingual language practices as normative for youth, grades K-5, El Pueblo Mágico, a STEM-oriented after-school program, and the UCLA Migrant Student Leadership Program for California youth from migrant farmworker backgrounds. Her empirical studies are funded by the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Sloane Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation as co-pi on the MacArthur Funded Connected Learning Research Network and the UCLA Sloane Center for the Everyday Lives of Middle Class Families.

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 won numerous awards, including the AERA Division C Sylvia Scribner Award for influencing the field of learning and instruction, the 2020 Dr. John J. Gumperz Memorial Award for Distinguished Lifetime Scholarship (LSP, AERA), the 2016 Oscar Causey award for influencing the field of literacy (LRA), the 2016 Medal of Excellence from the Columbia University/Teachers College, 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). 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. Gutiérrez received the AERA Hispanic Research in Elementary, Secondary, or Postsecondary Education Award and the Inaugural Award for Innovations in Research on Diversity in Teacher Education, Division K (AERA). She served on the U.S. Department of Education Reading First Advisory Committee and was a member of President Obama’s Education Policy Transition Team.