Kris D. Gutierrez

University of California, Berkeley | UCB · Graduate School of Education

This article examines a praxis model of teacher education and advances a new method for engaging novice teachers in reflective practice and robust teacher learning. Social design experiments—cultural historical formations designed to promote transformative learning for adults and children—are organized around expansive notions of learning and media...

This article addresses a challenge faced by those who study cultural variation in approaches to learning: how to characterize regularities of individuals’ approaches according to their cultural background. We argue against the common approach of assuming that regularities are static, and that general traits of individuals are attributable categoric...

This chapter focuses on the utopian methodological approach taken up by social design-based experiments, their conceptual underpinnings, and commitments. The methods are drawn from Gutiérrez’s empirical work and detail ways of seeing and capturing human learning activity crucial to envisioning and enacting new social futures with radical possibilit...

Throughout the U.S., Latinx communities represent a growing and critical segment of local, regional, and national electorates, but they are underrepresented at the polls. Their political disengagement stems from their historical sociopolitical marginalization and a lack of investment in their political integration. To foster more civic engagement a...

Chicana/Latina Feminist frameworks that center the lived experiences of Chicanas/Latinas/Mexicanas have helped to reshape profoundly the ways we think about the role and centrality of culture and identity in methods and methodology. However, this rich Chicana/Latina feminist cultural methodological and analytical framework has not been leveraged in...

We report on a curriculum development project in which students explore environmental racism through data. Recognizing that quantitative data alone is insufficient to understand the sociohistorical contexts of racism, we draw from syncretic approaches to learning that put everyday experiences and qualitative evidence into direct conversation with q...

In this article, we examine how a Latinx eight-year-old child’s participation in an online gaming community supported his involvement in a way of learning termed Learning by Observing and Pitching In (LOPI). Specifically, we focus on how the way that the online gaming community was organized allowed the child to be incorporated to contribute to a r...

The ISLS has long been focusing on innovative learning that supports inclusive socio-emotional and collaborative practices, and more recent research has taken up political and ethical dimensions of human learning as central to design, practice, partnership and research. The society is also taking concrete steps towards structural changes in its own...

We examine learning as movement as a utopian methodological approach that reorients how we shape and understand literacy learning ecologies with youth who are racialized as non-white. Understanding linguistic practice as integral to learning, and to common beliefs of what it means to be human, we consider how static notions of language are deployed...

We examine how individuals from non-dominant communities and very young children engage with others in ways that affirm their educational dignity—"the multifaceted sense of a person’s value generated via meaningful participation in substantive intra- and inter- personal learning experiences that recognize and cultivate one’s mind, humanity, and pot...

Writing Data Stories is a social design-based research project to co-design and study data literacy units. The project encourages nondominant students to integrate everyday practices and scientific datasets by using storytelling and computational transformation to highlight personally and socially relevant issues. We present an analysis of one cycl...

Considering the special issue on learning-on-the move in light of earlier work on learning as movement, this commentary reflects on how the articles in the special issue expand the field’s theoretical matrix of the sociohistorical, cognitive, sociopolitical, sociocultural, relational, and spatial. Taken together, they tease out new subject-object,...

This symposium advances the discussion on transdisciplinarity as a key theoretical construct to disrupt hegemonic disciplinary silos in the learning sciences and to open up equitable and inclusive disciplinary practices that make visible the silenced voices and hidden histories. This symposium is a collection of five papers connected to the central...

In this paper, we expand the concept of historical actors to elaborate on how transformative agency has been addressed in our work with youth from nondominant communities, particularly as they leverage digital tools. First, we revisit our work with migrant students, from which the concept arose. Next, we expand this theory by proposing four indicia...

This article addresses an approach to design-based research informed by cultural historical activity theory and ecological approaches to inquiry in which historicity, pro-lepsis, remediation, diversity and equity, transformability, resilience, and sustainability are organizing design principles. Social design-based experiments seek to co-design lea...

This article argues that building powerful literacies involves the centering of dispositions and practices that thrive on the boundary—spaces that are not always sanctioned as educational. Leveraging youths’ repertoires is particularly important for educators of non-dominant learners who are committed to challenging characterizations of their stude...

Drawing upon four years of research within a social design experiment, we focus on how teacher learning can be supported in designed environments that are organized around robust views of learning, culture, and equity. We illustrate both the possibility and difficulty of helping teachers disrupt the default teaching scripts that privilege tradition...

Based on data collected from a study of teachers' implementation of programming lessons in middle schools, we observed an emerging relationship between teachers' classroom practices and patterns in student motivation data. We theorized that pedagogical approaches influence mediation and other instructional decisions employed by teachers as they imp...

This commentary focuses on the ways the set of articles in this issue, taken together, engage an important and much needed conversation in design-based approaches to inquiry: that is, what does it mean to do work in and with nondominant communities? Drawing on cultural historical activity theory, decolonizing methodologies, and indigenous perspecti...

In this article, we advance an approach to design research that is organized around a commitment to transforming the educational and social circumstances of members of non-dominant communities as a means of promoting social equity and learning. We refer to this approach as social design experimentation. The goals of social design experiments includ...

This article is about designing for educational possibilities—designs that in their inception, social organization, and implementation squarely address issues of cultural diversity, social inequality, and robust learning. I discuss an approach to design-based research, social design experiments, that privileges a social scientific inquiry organized...

Informal learning is often treated as simply an alternative to formal, didactic instruction. This chapter discusses how the organization of informal learning differs across distinct settings but with important commonalities distinguishing informal learning from formal learning: Informal learning is nondidactic, is embedded in meaningful activity, b...

To be able to collaborate skillfully, people need to coordinate well with others, taking into account how their actions fit with those of their partners. This is a key aspect of an approach to learning called Learning by Observing and Pitching In, hypothesized to be common in many Indigenous-heritage communities of the Americas. This chapter consid...

This article focuses on the partner-like relations that emerge between undergraduates and youth as they engage in “Making and Tinkering” activities in an afterschool learning ecology, and illustrates the potential for designed tinkering activity to produce relational equity among participants. Grounded in sociocultural theory, but leveraging theore...

In this manuscript, we take up a “critical friend” perspective on sociopolitical development (SPD), seeking to expand the field’s understanding of the collective, intersectional, and dialectic qualities and dimensions in which sociopolitical youth development might occur. Specifically, we contribute to thinking around how SPD is conceptualized and...

Making and Tinkering " links science, technology, engineering and mathematics learning (STEM) to the do-it-yourself " maker " movement, where people of all ages " create and share things in both the digital and physical world " (Resnick & Rosenbaum, 2013). This paper examines designing what Resnick and Rosenbaum (2013) call " contexts for tinkerabi...

An educated citizenry that participates in and contributes to science technology engineering and mathematics innovation in the 21st century will require broad literacy and skills in computer science (CS). School systems will need to give increased attention to opportunities for students to engage in computational thinking and ways to promote a deep...

In this special issue, the structure–agency dialectic is used to shift the analytic frame in science education from focusing on youth as in need of remediation to rethinking new arrangements, tools, and forms of assistance and participation in support of youth learning science. This shift from “fixing” the individual to re-mediating and transformin...

This chapter brings together cultural-historical approaches to human development with interpretive and multi-sited ethnography in order to: (1) develop ethnographic tools that attend to the ways young people learn within and across multiple contexts; (2) draw from and contrast the methodological insights of single and multi-sited ethnography; and (...

This symposium will introduce and illustrate the Socio-cultural/CHAT family of approaches to Design Research. Design Research has become central to the Learning Sciences. It is a key strategy for the study of learning in settings outside the laboratory, and it embodies the twin goals building theoretical knowledge about learning and contributing to...

The authors argue for a reconceptualization of rigor that requires sustained, direct, and systematic documentation of what takes place inside programs to document how students and teachers change and adapt interventions in interactions with each other in relation to their dynamic local contexts. Building on promising new programs at the Institute o...

This symposium addresses challenges of understanding learning as multidimensional and embedded within and across multiple levels of contexts. Each paper articulates frameworks for designing and evaluating the impact of interventions in single and multiple settings that explicitly address how issues of identity, relationships, and belief systems wit...

El Pueblo Mágico is a social design experiment (Gutierrez & Vossoughi, 2010) in which youth and adults are developing deep and meaningful relationships which facilitate learning that is inclusive, participatory, and robust. This paper focuses on 'Making and Tinkering' practices to examine the relationship that develops as both adults and children e...

“Making and Tinkering” has become popular in informal education circles. The practice links science, technology, engineering and mathematics learning (STEM) to the do-it-yourself “maker” movement, where people of all ages “create and share things in both the digital and physical world” (Resnick & Rosenbaum, 2013). This paper examines a cultural his...

The authors examine the implications and limitations of the National Early Literacy Panel report on the early care of young children who are dual-language learners (DLLs). They examine the relevance of the report for DLLs, particularly the practice in this and other national synthesis reports of extrapolating implications for the education of young...

The chapters in this section collectively contribute to a body of work defined by its renewed focus on understanding the contextual and contingent nature of learning—work that also calls for, directly or by implication, a new model of interventionist research designed to improve the educational circumstance of underserved youth, notably students fr...

This report is a synthesis of ongoing research, design, and implementation of an approach to education called “connected learning.” It advocates for broadened access to learning that is socially embedded, interest-driven, and oriented toward educational, economic, or political opportunity. Connected learning is realized when a young person is able...

The growing poverty and inequity in America should create a sense of urgency in researchers to leverage what we know for the public good—to intervene more productively and vigorously in an ever more fragile public educational system and to address the increasing vulnerability of far too many youth in the United States. The current worldwide recessi...

Accounts of how culture constitutes the learning activities we accomplish with others are flourishing. These accounts illustrate how participants draw upon, adapt, and contest historically situated social practices, tools, and relations to accomplish their learning goals [Vygotsky: Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1978]. Yet, they often lack at...

In this article, we examine the affordances of polylingual and polycultural learning ecologies in expanding the linguistic repertoires of children, particularly young Dual Language Learners. In contrast to settings that promote the development of English and academic language at the expense of maintaining and developing home language, we argue that...

The authors examine the implications and limitations of the National Early Literacy Panel report on the early care of young children who are dual-language learners (DLLs).They examine the relevance of the report for DLLs, particularly the practice in this and other national synthesis reports of extrapolating implications for the education of young...

Children commonly observe and pitch in to ongoing activities in Indigenous communities of Mexico, according to ethnographic research. The present study examines the generality of this approach to learning by comparing its use among Mexican immigrants of two cultural backgrounds in the United States. Results showed more sustained attention to (and l...

This chapter examines major lines of inquiry in mathematics education through the prism of cultural historical activity theory, focusing on the lan-guage and discursive practices in the teaching and learning of school math-ematics. We make an analytic distinction between the language in and of mathematics learning in classrooms, noting the pitfalls...

This chapter examines major lines of inquiry in mathematics education through the prism of cultural historical activity theory, focusing on the language and discursive practices in the teaching and learning of school mathematics. We make an analytic distinction between the language in and of mathematics learning in classrooms, noting the pitfalls o...

In the United States, working middle class parents organize for their children's future success and, increasingly, extra-curricular activity becomes the socializing mechanism for this preparation. In this article, we take an anthropological approach to examine the following: 1) the nature and amount of extra-curricular activity families organize fo...

Activity theory seeks to analyze development within practical social activities. Activities organize our lives. In activities, humans develop their skills, personalities, and consciousness. Through activities, we also transform our social conditions, resolve contradictions, generate new cultural artifacts, and create new forms of life and the self....

The article provides a framework for the development of robust learning ecologies organized around the cultural historical concept of “re-mediation”. In contrast to traditional “remedial” approaches to students from nondominant communities, re-mediation involves a transformation of the learning ecology, including a shift in the way tools and forms...

In 1884 the Finnish realist artist Albert Edelfelt completed a painting entitled Boys on the Shore. In the painting three boys are playing with small handmade sailing boats on the shore. There is an expansive view of the horizon in the background, with sailboats in the harbor. The painting provides a dynamic perspective on a world of possibilities...

The book is a collection about cultural-historical activity theory as it has been developed and applied by Yrjö Engeström. The work of Engeström is both rooted in the legacy of Vygotsky and Leont'ev and focuses on current research concerns that are related to learning and development in work practices. His publications cross various disciplines and...

This essay argues for a paradigm shift in what counts as learning and literacy education for youth. Two related constructs are emphasized: collective Third Space and sociocritical literacy. The construct of a collective Third Space builds on an existing body of research and can be viewed as a particular kind of zone of proximal development. The per...

In this article, we study a local adaptation of the Fifth Dimension [Cole, M. (1996). Cultural psychology: A once and future discipline. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press] known as Las Redes (i.e., Networks of Collaboration in the Fifth Dimension) to examine how the multiple activity systems of Las Redes, e.g. the undergraduate course and the s...

In our previous “At Last” essay, “The “Problem’ of English Learners: Constructing Genres of Difference” (Gutiérrez & Orellana, 2006), we identified a predictable genre that characterizes much research on English Learners. We noted how the genre may unwittingly perpetuate deficit constructions and keep us from identifying other issues for redress”s...

For more than a decade, we have been involved in research with students for whom English is not the home language, learning what children can do across a range of practices and contexts, and trying to understand better the various pathways and contextual supports that promote their literacy learning. In this work we have struggled against commonpla...

At Last W h a t's t h e P rob l e m ? Co n s t r u c t i n g Different Ge nres for t h e St u dy of En g l i s h Le a r n e r s In our previous "At Last" essay, "The 'Problem' of English Learners: Constructing Genres of Difference" (Gutiérrez & Orellana, 2006), we identified a predictable genre that characterizes much research on English Learners....

Last spring our profession lost one of its leading voices-Stephen P. Witte, Knight Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Kent State University. Here, a few of his close friends and colleagues remember Steve and his many contributions to our field.

Reconceptualizing early childhood literacy: The sociocultural influence In April 2000, the National Reading Panel presented their analysis of more than 100,000 studies on early literacy and concluded that the five most essential components to a child's ability to read are the following: phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehe...