Kim Gomez

Kim Gomez
Sudikoff Fellow 2014 – 15

Serving within Urban Schooling and Information Studies at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, Associate Professor of Education Kim Gomez’s work examines the intricate relationship between the development of literacy and the development of an equitable society. Her study of the connection between literacy and the complex array of related socio-cultural and economic factors has helped to inform policy as well as advance instructional approaches and learning outcomes.
With a commitment to supporting underserved student learning through access to mathematics and science curricula in middle, high school, and community college, Professor Gomez’s work emphasizes language and literacy-rich mathematics and science teaching that is responsive to the learning needs of all students. Her work also employs digital media, learning technologies, and Web 2.0 technologies to support student learning both inside and outside the classroom.
Professor Gomez aims to dissolve a segregation of opportunity that exists among students: A divide that determines who learns how to use technologies to undertake more high-level tasks such as writing code, digital literacies and new media design, and computational analysis, from those who are taught only rudimentary skills such as keyboarding, data entry, and word processing.
Having joined the UCLA faculty in 2011, Professor Gomez continues to serve as a senior fellow and lead facilitator for Literacy and Language at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. She has also held faculty positions at the School of Education at the University of Pittsburgh, the College of Education and Learning Sciences Research Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Learning Sciences program at Northwestern University at Evanston. Before beginning doctoral study at the University of Chicago, Gomez was an Assistant Professor of General Studies for three years at Florida Memorial College in Miami.
Among a number of distinguished honors, Professor Gomez is the 2013 recipient of the Harold A. and Lois Haytin Faculty Award for her work to improve the quality of student writing in Grades 3 – 6 through the “Disciplinary Literacy Work Circle” project at UCLA Lab School.
Professor Gomez is the co-author of The Work of Language in Multicultural Classrooms: Talking Science, Writing Science (Routledge, 2008) as well as The Digital Youth Network: Cultivating New Media Citizenship in Urban Communities (Cambridge: MIT Press,2014).
Professor Gomez attended the University of Florida where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1978, and Florida State University where she earned a Master of Science in 1981 in Speech Pathology. She received her Master of Arts in 1991 and Ph.D. in 1994 in Educational Psychology from the University of Chicago.