Dolores Delgado Bernal

Professor Loyola Marymount University

  • Los Angeles CA

Department of Educational Leadership and Administration

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Loyola Marymount University

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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

Kansas State University; Manhattan, Kansas

BS

Personnel Management; Sociology Cognate (With Honors)

University of Missouri, Kansas City

MPA

Public Administration, Emphasis: Non-Profit Service Organizations

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)

Teaching Credential and Multiple Subject Bilingual Crosscultural Language Academic Development (BCLAD)

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Areas of Expertise

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

2023 AERA Fellow

2023-04-03

American Educational Research Association (AERA)

2019 National Prize for Excellence in Mexican American Studies

University of Arizona

2015 Derrick Bell Legacy Award

Critical Race Studies in Education Association

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Affiliations

  • 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

Latina/o Undergraduate Students Mentoring Latina/o Elementary Students: A Borderlands Analysis of Shifting Identities and First-Year Experiences

Harvard Educational Review, 79(4), 560-585

Delgado 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.

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A Chicana Feminist Epistemology Revisited: Cultivating Ideas a Generation Later

Harvard Educational Review, 82(4), 513-539

Calderon, 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.

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Vamos a Platicar: The Contours of Pláticas as Methodology

Chicana/Latina Studies, 15(2), 98-121

Fierros, 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

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