Plenary Speakers

The Learning Conference will feature plenary sessions by some of the world’s leading thinkers and innovators in the field, as well as numerous parallel presentations by researchers and practitioners.

Garden Conversation Sessions

Plenary Speakers will make formal 30-minute presentations. They will also participate in 60-minute Garden Conversations – unstructured sessions that allow delegates a chance to meet the speakers and talk with them informally about the issues arising from their presentation.

Please return to this page for regular updates.

The Speakers

Kris D. Gutiérrez

Kris D. Gutiérrez is Professor of Literacy and Learning Sciences and holds the Inaugural Provost’s Chair at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is also Professor Emerita of Social Research Methodology in the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles where she also served as Director of the Education Studies Minor and Director of the Center for the Study of Urban Literacies. Gutiérrez is the current President and a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). She is also a Fellow at the National Conference on Research on Language and Literacy, and the National Education Policy Center.

Her research examines learning in designed learning environments, with particular attention to students from non-dominant communities and English Learners. Her work on Third Spaces examines the affordances of syncretic approaches to literacy learning and re-mediation of functional systems of learning. Professor Gutiérrez’s research has been published widely in premier academic journals and is a co-editor of Learning and Expanding with Activity Theory. Additionally, Professor Gutiérrez has written a column for the Los Angeles Times’ Reading Page.

Gutiérrez was recently elected to the national Academy of Education and nominated by President Obama to be a member of the National Board for the Institute of Education Sciences. She has received numerous awards, including the 2010 AERA Hispanic Research in Elementary, Secondary, or Postsecondary Education Award and the 2010 Inaugural Award for Innovations in Research on Diversity in Teacher Education, Division K (AERA) and was the 2010 Osher Fellow at the Exploratorium Museum of Science. Previously, Gutiérrez received the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Distinguished Scholar Award 2007 and was the 2005 recipient of the AERA Division C Sylvia Scribner Award for influencing the field of learning and instruction, and was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences 2006-07.

She serves on numerous policymaking and advisory boards. She served as a member of the U.S. Department of Education Reading First Advisory Committee and recently served as a member of President Obama’s Education Policy Transition Team. Professor Gutiérrez is also President of the National Conference on Research on Language and Literacy. Professor Gutiérrez was also recently identified as one of the 2009 Top 100 influential Hispanics in the nation by Hispanic Business Magazine. Gutiérrez has held Noted Scholar positions in Japan and Canada and is an invited speaker both nationally and internationally.

Gutiérrez has used her expertise to improve the educational condition of immigrant and underserved students in out of school and formal schooling settings and to design effective models for teacher preparation. For more than 15 years, Professor Gutiérrez served as the principal investigator and director of an after-school computer learning club for low-income and immigrant children (UCLinks, Las Redes) and for more than 10 years was the Director of the UCLA Migrant Scholars Leadership Program, a residential summer academic program for high school student from migrant farmworker backgrounds. Both programs have been touted as exemplary models of excellence and transformative change.

Gunther Kress

Gunther Kress is Professor of Semiotics and Education at the Institute of Education, University of London. His interests are in the ongoing development of Social Semiotic theory so as to understand principles of representation, meaning-making and communication in contemporary social environments. The frame of application is multimodal representation and communication, with its focus on resources and forms of communication in all modes, including those of speech and writing. Conditions and environments for ‘learning’ in the contemporary period is one special focus of application.

Some of his publications in this area are Learning to write (1982/1994); Linguistic processes in sociocultural practices (1984/1989); Social Semiotics (1988, with R Hodge); Before Writing: rethinking the paths to literacy (1996); Reading Images: the grammar of graphic design (1996/2006, with T van Leeuwen); Multimodal Discourse: the modes and media of contemporary communication (2002, with T van Leeuwen); Literacy in the new media age (2003); English in Urban Classrooms (2005, with C. Jewitt, J. Bourne, A. Franks, J. Hardcastle, K. Jones, E. Reid), and Multimodality. A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication (2010). Recent research projects are ‘Museums, exhibitions and the visitor’ (funded by the Swedish National Research Foundation) and “Gains and Losses: changes in teaching materials 1935 – 2005” (funded by the Economic and Social Science Research Council, UK)