Kris D. Gutiérrez, Immediate Past President
Kris D. Gutiérrez, Immediate Past President
 
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Immediate Past President
Kris D. Gutiérrez
University of Colorado at Boulder

Kris D. Gutiérrez, Professor of Education and Provost’s Chair in the School of Education at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is immediate past president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), starting this one-year term at the conclusion of the 92nd Annual Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Professor Gutiérrez succeeded Carol D. Lee, Professor of Learning Sciences and African American Studies at Northwestern University. Dr. Gutiérrez now serves as Immediate Past President of AERA through April 17, the concluding day of the 2012 Annual Meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Professor Gutiérrez previously served on the faculty at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) Graduate School of Education and Information Studies where she was  Co-Principal Investigator of the UCLA Center for the Everyday Lives of Families in Anthropology, Director of the Education Studies Minor, and Director of the Center for the Study of Urban Literacies. Gutiérrez also served as Associate Faculty at the University of California, San Diego Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition.

Her research interests address the relationship between literacy, culture and learning, and target how students appropriate cultural concepts. Specifically, her work focuses on the processes by which people negotiate meaning in culturally organized contexts, using language and literacies that are embedded within socio-historical traditions. Issues of equity and excellence are recurrent themes in her work.

Gutiérrez has conducted long-term ethnographic studies across various school districts. Her studies have centered on the cultural dimensions of literacy learning; the social organization of formal and non-formal learning environments; the effects of new forms of mediation on student and teacher learning; the effects of new policies and reform initiatives on English learners and their schooling practices; and reading and writing development in elementary- and secondary-aged students, including English Learners and students from migrant farm worker backgrounds.

Professor Gutiérrez, who holds a Ph.D. degree in education/curriculum and instruction (1987) from the University of Colorado at Boulder, has been recognized for professional accomplishments. In 2006-2007, she was a fellow at the prestigious Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California. Most recently, Professor Gutiérrez served as a member of President Barack Obama’s Education Policy Transition Team.

From 2006 to 2009, Professor Gutiérrez chaired the AERA Social Justice in Action Committee. Professor Gutierrez was the 2005 recipient of the AERA Division C Sylvia Scribner Award, and in 2007 received the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Committee on Scholars of Color in Education.

Her scholarship has been published in many journals, including two AERA peer-reviewed journals: the Review of Research in Education and Educational Researcher, plus Human Development; Mind, Culture and Activity; Reading Research Quarterly, the Harvard Educational Review, Linguistics and Education, Discourse Processes, the Bilingual Research Journal, Urban Education, the International Journal of Educational Research, Education and Urban Society, Language Arts, the Review of Education, Lifelong Learning in Europe, Pedagogies: An International Journal, and Research in the Teaching of English.