Kris Gutiérrez is a Professor in the Division of Urban Schooling in the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies. Professor Gutiérrez’s research focuses on studying the literacy practices of urban schools. In particular, her research concerns itself with the social and cognitive consequences of literacy practices in formal and non-formal learning contexts. Across her work, she examines the relationship between literacy, culture, and human development. Professor Gutiérrez’s long-term ethnographic studies in Los Angeles area schools across various school districts have afforded opportunity to study the following: 1) the social and discursive practices of literacy instruction; 2) how effective literacy practices are constructed and sustained; 3) the policy issues and implications of urban schooling practices; and 4) the effects of Proposition 227 (ballot initiative to eliminate bilingual education) on the teaching and learning of literacy. Issues of equity and excellence become important and recurrent themes throughout her work. Professor Gutiérrez is a highly visible leader in the area of literacy, biliteracy and urban education and serves on a number of national policy making and academic advisory boards/committees such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the College Board, the American Educational Research Association, the International Reading Association, and National Council of Teachers of English and is a keynote speaker at a number of state, national, and international conferences including Australia, Denmark, Mexico, Germany, and Guatemala, for example. Professor Gutiérrez's research has been published in Mind, Culture, and Activity, the Harvard Educational Review, Linguistics and Education, Discourse Processes, Urban Education, the International Journal of Educational Reform, Education and Urban Society, Theory into Practice and Language Arts, for example. Most currently, Professor Gutiérrez has written columns for the Los Angeles Times’ Reading page.