American Educational Research Association 

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Kris D. Gutiérrez, Education Research Scholar, Voted
President-Elect of the American Educational Research Association

WASHINGTON, D.C., March 9, 2009—Kris D. Gutiérrez, Professor of Social Research Methodology at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA), has been elected president-elect of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). Her term as president starts at the conclusion of the 2010 Annual Meeting, after one year of service as president-elect.

Professor Gutiérrez will succeed Carol D. Lee, Professor of Learning Sciences and African American Studies at Northwestern University. Professor Lee will assume the AERA presidency April 17, 2009 at the close of the Association's 90th Annual Meeting in San Diego, California.

Professor Gutiérrez is a member of the faculty at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. There, she is 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 serves as Associate Faculty at the University of California, San Diego Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition.

Professor Gutiérrez, who holds a Ph.D. degree in education/curriculum and instruction (1987) from the University of Colorado at Boulder, has been recognized professionally. 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.

Her research interests address the relationship between literacy, culture and learning, and targets 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.   

She is a familiar professional in Los Angeles area schools, where she 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.

An active AERA member since 1997, Professor Gutiérrez currently is chair of AERA’s Social Justice Action Committee. She also received the Sylvia Scribner Award in 2005 from AERA’s Division C in recognition of a member who has significantly influenced thinking and research in the field of learning and instruction, and in 2007 the Distinguished Scholar Award, presented by AERA’s 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. 

Readers of the Los Angeles Times may recognize Gutiérrez’s name as the author of a column on the newspaper’s Reading page. Her professional activities that relate to reading extend to her service on the U.S. Department of Education’s advisory committee for the Reading First program. She also is the principal investigator of an after-school learning club. 

− AERA−

The American Educational Research Association (AERA), founded in 1916 and based in Washington, D.C., aims to advance knowledge about education, to encourage scholarly inquiry related to education, and to promote the use of research to improve education and serve the public good. As the national interdisciplinary research society in education, AERA is dedicated to strengthening education research capacity by promoting research of the highest quality, undertaking education and training programs, and advancing sound research and science policy. AERA publishes six peer-reviewed journals and research and methodology books central to the field. Its newest book, Handbook of Education Policy Research, will be released in April 2009.