Dolores Delgado Bernal
Professor | Loyola Marymount University
Los Angeles, CA, UNITED STATES
Department of Educational Leadership and Administration
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Biography
Delgado Bernal was a first-generation college student and an elementary school teacher in Pasadena Unified who earned her Ph.D. from UCLA. She was faculty at the University of Utah for 17 years, and then at Cal State LA she served as chair for the Department of Chicana(o) and Latina(o) Studies and afterwards as Associate Dean for the College of Ethnic Studies. She’s a scholar-activist whose scholarship bridges the fields of education and Chicanx studies and whose passion is in mentoring students. Her scholarship draws from Chicana feminist studies and critical race studies to investigate educational (in)equity, Latinx educational pathways, feminista pedagogies, and different forms of student resistance. She has published over 40 articles/chapters, and has co-authored or co-edited four books. She has received numerous awards for her scholarship, teaching, and/or mentoring, including, the American Educational Research Association Distinguished Scholar Award, Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social Tortuga Award, and Critical Race Studies in Education Association Derrick Bell Legacy Award. Her biggest award is being mamá to three wonderful sons.
Education (4)
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA): PhD, Administration, Curriculum, and Teaching Studies
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA): Teaching Credential and Multiple Subject Bilingual Crosscultural Language Academic Development (BCLAD)
University of Missouri, Kansas City: MPA, Public Administration, Emphasis: Non-Profit Service Organizations
Kansas State University; Manhattan, Kansas: BS, Personnel Management; Sociology Cognate (With Honors)
Areas of Expertise (6)
Chicana/Latina Feminist Theories
Ethnic Studies & Femenista Pedagogies
Anti-Racist & Social Justice Education
Chicanx/Latinx Educatonal Pathways
Critical Race Theories, Methodologies & Praxis
Decolonial & Feminist Methodologies
Accomplishments (7)
2023 AERA Fellow (professional)
2023-04-03
American Educational Research Association (AERA)
2019 National Prize for Excellence in Mexican American Studies (professional)
University of Arizona
2015 Derrick Bell Legacy Award (professional)
Critical Race Studies in Education Association
2015 Tortuga Scholar-Mentor Award (professional)
Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social
2011 Paulo Freire Critical Pedagogy Award (professional)
American Educational Research Association
2010 Distinguished Scholar Award (professional)
American Educational Research Association (AERA)
2000 Ford Postdoctoral Fellowship (professional)
National Research Council & Ford Foundation
Affiliations (5)
- American Educational Research Association
- Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social
- Critical Race Studies in Education Association
- National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies
- Oral History Association
Articles (8)
(Re)imagining Transformational Resistance: Seeds of Resistance and Pedagogical Ruptures
Urban EducationHannegan-Martinez, S., Mendoza Aviña, S., Delgado Bernal, D., & Solorzano, D.G.
in press
Remembering and Revisiting Pedagogies of the Home
American Educational Research Journal, 58(3),567-601Garcia, N.M. & Delgado Bernal, D.
Almost two decades after Delgado Bernal’s theorization of pedagogies of the home, this article examines pedagogies of the home of four Chicana/o college-educated families to understand the role of parent engagement not only in the college choice processes but also in college completion and graduate school enrollment. Using Chicana feminisms to inform educational oral histories, four Chicana/o parent-child dyads were interviewed. The findings suggest that among Chicana/o college-educated families the (re)making of home, (re)covering tensions, and (re)claiming and (re)learning of cultural knowledge were the pedagogies of the home that were embraced by two successive generations of college completers. Complexities, contradictions, and nuances among Chicana/o college-educated families add to the theorization of pedagogies of the home.
Theorizing Knowledge with Pláticas: Moving Toward Transformative Qualitative Inquiries
Qualitative Inquiry, 27(10), 1213-1220Flores Carmona, J., Hamzeh, M., Delgado Bernal, D., & Zareer I.H.
In this article, we engaged in pláticas to write about the methodology of pláticas. We show the use of this method by theorizing the pláticas. Our pláticas helped us reveal how we have experienced epistemicide and apartheid of knowledge blocked by epistemological racism in academia. We emphasized how the marginalization and invalidation in academia of this method happens and continues to happen especially in the social sciences. We demonstrate how this method has not been absent, but rather it has not been legitimized in academia. We also show how our refusal to employ dominant epistemologies allows us to move toward transformative qualitative inquiries.
Disrupting Epistemological Boundaries: Reflections on Feminista Methodological and Pedagogical Interventions
Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, 45(1), 155-169Delgado Bernal, D.
Reflections on Feminista Methodological and Pedagogical Interventions
A Testimonio of Critical Race Feminista Parenting: Snapshots from My Childhood and My Parenting
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in EducationDelgado Bernal, D.
The author employs a testimonio to partake in the instructive and cathartic tradition of sharing experiences, mistakes, and (mis)understandings of parenting children of color. In doing so, she draws from her experiences growing up in a Mexican American family and her experiences of mothering three Brown sons as a Chicana activist-scholar. She grounds her parenting in a critical race feminista praxis and subsequently addresses testimonio as her methodology and pedagogy. She then shares brief snapshots of how she was parented and how she has parented looking for the transformative ruptures and healing possibilities in the experiences.
Vamos a Platicar: The Contours of Pláticas as Methodology
Chicana/Latina Studies, 15(2), 98-121Fierros, C. & Delgado Bernal, D.
A growing number of Chican@ scholars, especially in the field of education, are employing pláticas as a research method. Yet missing from the research literature is an explicit conceptualization of pláticas1 as a Chicana/Latina feminist method or methodology. This article tracks a genealogy of the use of pláticas from the late 1970s and 1980s through the present and then identifies the ways Chicana/Latina feminists have engaged pláticas from within a particular epistemological location. The authors extract underlying assumptions to offer principles of pláticas as part of a Chicana/Latina feminist methodology
A Chicana Feminist Epistemology Revisited: Cultivating Ideas a Generation Later
Harvard Educational Review, 82(4), 513-539Calderon, D., Delgado Bernal, D., Velez, V. N., Perez Huber, L., and Malagon, M. C.
In this article, the authors simultaneously examine how education scholars have taken up the call for (re)articulating Chicana feminist epistemological perspectives in their research and speak back to Dolores Delgado Bernal's 1998 Harvard Educational Review article, "Using a Chicana Feminist Epistemology in Educational Research." They address the ways in which Chicana scholars draw on their ways of knowing to unsettle dominant modes of analysis, create decolonizing methodologies, and build upon what it means to utilize Chicana feminist epistemology in educational research. Moreover, they demonstrate how such work provides new narratives that embody alternative paradigms in education research. These alternative paradigms are aligned with the scholarship of Gloria Anzaldúa, especially her theoretical concepts of nepantla, El Mundo Zurdo, and Coyolxauhqui. Finally, the authors offer researcher reflections that further explore the tensions and possibilities inherent in employing Chicana feminist epistemologies in educational research.
Latina/o Undergraduate Students Mentoring Latina/o Elementary Students: A Borderlands Analysis of Shifting Identities and First-Year Experiences
Harvard Educational Review, 79(4), 560-585Delgado Bernal, D., Alemán, E. Jr., & Garavito, A.
This article examines the experiences of first-year Latina/o undergraduates at a predominantly white institution. Through a borderlands analysis, the authors explore how these students describe their experiences participating in an ethnic studies course and mentoring Latina/o elementary schoolchildren. The authors find that these experiences served as "sitios y lenguas" (decolonizing spaces and discourses; Perez, 1998) in which the undergraduate students were able to reflect on the ongoing transformation of their social and political identities, revealing the complex and fluid "latinidades" (Latina/o identities; Latina Feminist Group, 2001) that exist among the Latina/o university students. This article explores the physical and metaphorical borders (Anzaldua, 1987) the undergraduates occupy, navigate, and challenge while they work simultaneously as mentors in a mostly Latina/o setting and as college students on a mostly white campus.
