Bio
Arturo Cortez, PhD (he/they) is a Visiting Scholar at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education. 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. For the 2024-2026 academic years, Dr. Cortez was a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow and a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Davis School of Education. His research has been supported by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, the National Academy of Education, and the Spencer Foundation. Furthermore, Dr. Cortez is the recipient of the 2025 Jan Hawkins Award for Early Career Contributions to Humanistic Research and Scholarship in Learning Technologies from the American Educational Research Association (Division C). Dr. Cortez, a former public school educator, holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.