Kris Gutiérrez
Kris Gutiérrez is professor at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA and the Director of the Education Studies minor. She is also the Director of the Center for the Study of Urban Literacies. Gutiérrez earned a PhD at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her current research interests include a study of the sociocultural contexts of literacy development, particularly the study of the acquisition of academic literacy for language minority students. Her research also focuses on understanding the relationship between language, culture, development, and pedagogies of empowerment. She is a regular columnist for the Los Angeles Times, and has received many honors including the Outstanding Latina Faculty Award awarded by the American Association of Higher Education in 1999 and the Harriet and Charles Gluckman Distinguished Teaching Award at UCLA (1997).
Her publications
are numerous; some recent publications include: "So what's new in
the English Language Arts: Challenging policies and practices", Language
Arts Journal (in press); "Hypermediating literacy activity: How
learning contexts get reorganized", in O. Saracho & B. Spodek
Contemporary Perspectives in Early Childhood Education (in press);
"English for the children: The new literacy of the old world order",
Bilingual Review Journal (2001); and "Teaching and learning
in the 21st Century", English Education, (2001).
Ray McDermott
Ray McDermott has
been a professor at Stanford University since 1989. He was an Elementary
School Teacher in the New York City Public Schools prior to returning
to graduate school and earning his Ph.D. in Anthropology at Stanford in
1977. His dissertation, Kids Make Sense, is still frequently cited.
Prior to teaching at Stanford University, he was with Teachers College,
Columbia University from 1979-1989. Dr. McDermott takes a broad interest
in the analysis of human communication, the organization of school success
and failure, and the history and use of various literacies around the
world. His work includes studies of inner-city public schools, after-school
computer clubs, middle-school mathematics reform classrooms, and the function
of information technologies in different cultures. He was the 2001 winner
of the Council on Anthropology in Education Spindler Award for anthropological
research in education.
His publications include: "A century of Margaret Mead," Teachers
College Record (in press); "Culture is not an environment of
the mind," Journal of the Learning Sciences (1999); Successful
failure: The school America builds (with Hervé Varenne, 1998);
"When is Math or Science?," Thinking Practices in Mathematics
and Science Learning (with Vicki Webber, 1998); and "Achieving
school failure 1972-1997," Education and Cultural Process (1997).