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About Dr. Cortez |
Arturo Cortez, PhD is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of California, Davis. As a learning scientist, Dr. Cortez explores how justice- and future-oriented contexts of teaching and learning can support educators and young people to imagine beyond today’s injustices. In particular, he is interested in how intergenerational and transdisciplinary collaboratives speculate new possible futures, mediated by their participation with everyday technologies in gaming contexts, for example. As such, Dr. Cortez designed The Learning to Transform Technologies (LiTT) Lab to study how play-based learning environments encourage educators to engage in more symmetrical relationships with young people, while also developing expansive pedagogical models that center equitable relationship-building and robust collaboration. His work has been published in Reading Research Quarterly (2024), Mind, Culture, and Activity (2023, 2019), 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 and the Spencer Foundation.
Dr. Cortez currently serves as Associate Editor of Mind, Culture, and Activity, the premier journal in sociocultural and cultural historical approaches to education and learning. He is also the Program Co-Chair for the 2025 International Conference of the Learning Sciences. Recently, Dr. Cortez was recognized as an honorable mention for the 2024 Jan Hawkins Award for Early Career Contributions to Humanistic Research and Scholarship in Learning Technologies (AERA Division C). For the 2024-2025 academic year, Dr. Cortez will be a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow. Dr. Cortez, a former public school educator, holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. |