The Future of Middle Level Education–Chicana Maestras and Vignettes

This interdisciplinary case study research centers anticolonial theories and Chicana feminist epistemology (Bernal, 1998) to interrogate the experiences of Chicana maestras during their clinical teaching semester. The experiences of Chicana maestras is often silenced in educational research, especially in the research of prospective middle grades educators. This work seeks to challenge the often-colonizing practices of teaching and research and seeks to serve as a model of the possibilities for research in middle level teacher education. The findings of this research center on the collective power of Chicanas experiencing teaching and learning as a collective through the creation of vignettes. These vignettes highlight the themes of maestras and comunidad, exploring and solidifying identity, thriving colonialism, clinical chingonas, and sharing of knowledge. Each of these themes, and the collective work that went into this research, demonstrate the importance of Chicanas in middle level education.

Indigenous Girls Write, Right!? Unsettling Urban Literacies with Indigenous Writing Pedagogies

This article begins with the fundamental premise that Indigenous adolescent girls are writers. Indigenous adolescent girls speak and write in multitudes of voices, yet their physical and literary presence is often unaccounted in educational research and writing. Guided by the theoretical insights of Chicana Feminist Epistemology and Tribal Critical Race Theory this paper illuminates how Indigenous Writing Pedagogies (IWP) emerged to acknowledge land and gendered relationships in urban schools. The author presents implications for Indigenous notions of literacies and relationships that can be elevated by educators working in and out of urban school spaces.

A Revolucionista Ethic of Care: Four Mexicana Educators’ Subterraneous Social Justice Revolution of Fighting and Feeding

This qualitative Testimonio study reveals an ethic of care particular to Mexican/Mexican American youth through pedagogy and Testimonios of four Mexican/Mexican American female educators along the U.S./Mexico border. Using a Chicana feminist epistemology, findings reveal a reframed social justice revolution I term Revolucionista Ethic of Care, which bears an identity rooted in land, corn, and ancestral lines; urgency to resist oppression alongside knowledge that doing so is dangerous; fluid, protective Mexicana/Mestiza consciousness; and undetectable weapons of Body, Spirit, Tongue. Amid growing human rights abuses and a U.S. administration hostile to dissent, findings are increasingly relevant. Findings may inform dialogue regarding sociopolitical issues shaping schooling for marginalized youth and may advance theoretical and curricular understanding of social justice education and ethic(s) of care.

Liminal Knowledge: Positioning Intersectionality in Academia

This qualitative inquiry explores what Chicana/o doctoral students in an Educational Leadership program perceive about the positioning of the intersection of their gender, race, and ethnicity in relationship to their academic advancement and leadership development. Chicana feminist epistemology (CFE) grounds this study to invigorate the interrogation of dualities imposed by binary social constructs of male/female, Chicana/Chicano, and Chicana/o/White. Testimonio accounts of three Chicana/o doctoral students reveal a liminal space of knowledge where the daily experiences of choques or cultural collisions are revealed as the norm of academic life. We assert, that by tapping this vital source of liminal knowledge, we can re-position the intersections of our identity as aspiring educational leaders to re-articulate, re-imagine, and claim spaces of leadership informed by a mestiza consciousness1 that is inclusive of the many layers of our intersectionality.

Toward a Critical Race Nepantlera Methodology: Embracing Liminality in Anti-Colonial Research

Given the inequitable opportunities and marginalizing experiences for undocumented Students of Color, this manuscript builds on the work of previous Scholars of Color to challenge the traditional roles of researchers during the data collection process. Guided by critical race theory, nepantleras, and Chicana feminist epistemology, the article proposes a critical race nepantlera methodology (CRNM). CRNM entails a reflexive and reciprocal approach that guides the research process and is rooted in anti-colonial social justice actions. Two exemplars from previous studies elaborate on CRNM and the relevance to critically conscious researchers, particularly when conducting studies with undocumented Students of Color.

Chicana Feminist Epistemology: Past, Present, and Future

In 1998, Dolores Delgado Bernal charted a path from Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands into the heart of educational research in the pages of this journal. Drawing inspiration and critical direction from Chicana feminists and feminists of color more broadly, Delgado Bernal sought to interrupt habits of “epistemological racism” in educational research. Her article “Using a Chicana Epistemology in Educational Research” criticized conventional notions of objectivity and universal foundations of knowledge for erasing the specific intersectionality and location of Chicana experiences. Delgado Bernal defined cultural intuition as the deliberate employment of Chicana identity—its substance and its expression—in the theoretical and interpretive repertoires of Chicana researchers. She then, by example, through an oral history of Chicana students, showed how this feminist framework served the broader aims of educational research by amplifying rather than silencing Chicana voices. The article and the framework it put forth inspired a number of researchers and theorists.

A Chicana Feminist Epistemology Revisited: Cultivating Ideas a Generation Later

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.

Thriving in Our Identity and in the Academy: Latina Epistemology as a Core Resource

In this article, Milagros Castillo-Montoya and María Torres-Guzmán, two intergenerational Puerto Rican female scholars, use testimonios as a method for sharing funds of knowledge that may support and encourage emerging scholars’ efforts to critique, create, and expand on current educational theories, methods, and pedagogies. They draw on Chicana feminist epistemology to analyze their six-month charlas, informal conversations. They view their own Puerto Rican experiences from this lens and, in an effort to develop a Latina Epistemology Framework, expand the existing framework through a new dimension they refer to as lucha. They also put forth a model of research that furthers the use of testimonios as a mode of inquiry and as a process that may lead to mentorship in the academy for first-generation scholars.

Using a Chicana Feminist Epistemology in Educational Research

In this article, Dolores Delgado Bernal outlines a Chicana feminist epistemological framework that is new to the field of educational research. This framework, which draws from the existing work of Chicana feminists, questions the notions of objectivity and a universal foundation of knowledge. A Chicana feminist epistemology is also grounded in the life experiences of Chicanas and involves Chicana research participants in analyzing how their lives are being interpreted, documented, and reported, while acknowledging that many Chicanas lead lives with significantly different opportunity structures than men or White women. As part of this framework, Delgado Bernal also introduces the concept of cultural intuition to name a complex process that acknowledges the unique viewpoints that many Chicana scholars bring to the research process. In the latter half of the article, she illustrates the importance of this framework in educational research by describing an oral history project on Chicana student resistance and activism as seen from this framework. Her conceptual discussion and research example together demonstrate that employing a Chicana feminist epistemology in educational research is one means of resisting traditional paradigms that often distort or omit the experiences and knowledge of Chicanas. (pp. 555-582)