Lorena Gutierrez, PhD

Assistant Professor
Teaching in the School of Education 
University of California, Riverside

Dr. Lorena Gutiérrez is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in the School of Education at the University of California, Riverside. She earned her Ph.D. in Curriculum, Instruction and Teacher Education from Michigan State University. Her research highlights the ways Latinx migrant and seasonal farmworkers thrive in their educational pursuits despite the inequities they face in K–12 schools. In her three-year ethnographic study, “Use my name, they need to know who I am!”: Latina/o Migrant and Seasonal Farmworker Youth at the Interstices of the Educational Pipeline, she examined the schooling experiences of Latina/o migrant farmworker youth in K-12 schools and a High School Equivalency Program in the Midwest. Her research contributes much needed asset-based research on the schooling experiences and agency of migrant and seasonal farmworker youth in pursuit of education within and beyond K-12 schools. Dr. Gutiérrez’s research is rooted in learning with migrant and seasonal farmworkers in the Midwest, her own experiences in growing up bilingual in Colton, California, and the heritage of farm work that her grandfather cultivated in Jalisco, Mexico.