Arturo Cortez

UC Berkeley
cortez.arturo@gmail.com

Arturo Cortez is a doctoral candidate in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation examines how teachers design environments that promote humanizing approaches to learning for non-dominant youth. In particular, his work focuses on how teachers learn how to leverage youths’ everyday cultural practices in the classroom. In this respect, he explores how to organize learning in teacher education classrooms to support, develop, and expand how novice teachers see and design for consequential learning through the use of video and virtual reality technologies. In addition to this work, Arturo also co-founded Xóchitl Justice Press (XJP), a research project and publishing press, that works with young people to conceptualize, write and produce nonfiction books for beginning readers that are educational and representative of students’ lives. With the help of pre-service teachers, over 50 books, featuring photographs of people and places from youth’s communities, have been published and shared with emergent readers in San Francisco’s Western Addition and beyond. XJP provides a venue for non-dominant youth to amplify their stories, as well as develop necessary literacy skills, while at the same time providing relevant and relatable books for young children and helping novice teachers learn how to leverage children’s cultural practices towards social transformation. Moreover, Arturo’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. He holds a B.A. in the Biological Basis of Behavior from the University of Pennsylvania, an Ed.M. from Harvard University, and a M.A.T. from the Center for Teaching Excellence and Social Justice at University of San Francisco.