Arturo Cortez is an Assistant Professor of Teacher Learning, Research and Practice at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Broadly, his work is animated by cultural historical activity to explore how teachers collectively design for transformative and humanizing learning environments that leverage the everyday cultural practices of nondominant youth in urban settings. In his work with novice teachers, he intentionally designs for equity to understand the learning processes that emerge as teachers learn how to break away from dominant forms of schooling, opening up opportunities for new relationships between teachers, students, school administration, and community members.
There are three main queries that Professor Cortez takes up: (1) How might teacher learning environments be organized to support, develop, and expand how novice teachers see and design for robust and consequential forms of learning? (2) What types of collective reflective practices might afford teachers to engage in transformative practices, as they become designers of their own professional vision? (3) How might teacher learning be conceptualized as both a product and process, as well as an ecological phenomenon? His most recent work has been published in the Review of Research in Education and Mind, Culture, and Activity. Professor Cortez’s early commitments to amplifying the everyday practices of youth were jointly-honed and developed while he was a middle school teacher in East Palo Alto and a high school teacher in San Francisco.