|
|
About Dr. Cortez |
|
Arturo Cortez, PhD is a Visiting Scholar at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education and a learning scientist who studies how young people and educators learn by imagining and building worlds otherwise. His research examines how play, speculation, and everyday technologies can become resources for questioning injustice, reorganizing social relationships, and collectively creating more just possible futures.
His scholarship is particularly concerned with what becomes possible when young people and adults learn together across generations, disciplines, and differences in expertise and experience. Across these settings, Dr. Cortez studies how new forms of participation and collaboration can create more equitable relationships while expanding what counts as learning, expertise, and possibility. Dr. Cortez is the founder of the The Learning to Transform Technologies (LiTT) Lab, a play-based research and design-based environment for studying how educators and young people build more symmetrical relationships, collaborate across differences in expertise and experience, and collectively create new possibilities for learning and social life. His scholarship spans the learning sciences, literacy, gaming and digital media, speculative futures, and justice-centered design. His work has been published in International Journal of Qualitative Studies of Education (2025), Reading Research Quarterly (2024), Mind, Culture, and Activity (2019, 2023), Cognition and Instruction (2022), the Journal of Futures Studies (2022), the Association of Mexican American Educators Journal (2020), and the Review of Research in Education (2017). Furthermore, his research has been supported by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, the National Academy of Education, and the Spencer Foundation. In 2025, Dr. Cortez received the Jan Hawkins Award for Early Career Contributions to Humanistic Research and Scholarship in Learning Technologies from the American Educational Research Association (Division C). From 2024-2026, Dr. Cortez was a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow. He previously served as Associate Editor of Mind, Culture, and Activity from 2020–2025. A former public school educator, Dr. Cortez holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining Stanford, he was a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Davis School of Education.
|
