Opening up the world of research methodologies, Dolores Delgado Bernal, Ph.D. of LMU School of Education brought a new way of thinking and collecting information that focused on bringing Latina women into the bigger picture, and having their voices heard. “Early research used platicás as an entryway – as small talk before getting to the research,” said Delgado Bernal, a professor in SOE’s Department of Educational Leadership and Administration and co-chair of its doctoral program in Educational Leadership for Social Justice.
Around 50 attendees gathered in the Von Der Ahe Suite on level 3 of the William H. Hannon Library for Faculty Pub Night on October 13 to hear Delgado Bernal discuss how she has used platicás in her research and paved the way for others to do the same. The two takeaways she hoped the audience gathered were “An understanding of the trajectory and journey of the Viaje and the understanding of what feminista platicá can look like.”
Platicá translated from Spanish means “conversation,” and that is essentially what a feminista platicá. Delgado Bernal shared the stories of the first feministas in her life, her mother and her sister, and through them she learned the strength of Latina women and inspired her to evaluate it as a method of information gathering. A platicá is an unstructured conversation with someone about what you are researching, the goal to understand their stories and life experiences that further your research. Platicás are two-way conversations with no detachment, with the focus on the collaborator. It is a methodology that disrupts traditional research and finds more intimate relationships and experiences in the world of data collection and research.
As a first-generation college student, Delgado Bernal earned her Ph.D. from UCLA, then went on to become a professor of educational leadership and administration at the University of Utah and later California State University, Los Angeles. In 2023 she was named a fellow of the American Educational Research Association.
Last year Delgado Bernal published a journal with a few co-authors as a specific space for the platicás methodology. It had over 70 submissions, 10 of which were published in the journal. What she found was that there were lots of young scholars that took her research methodology and started pushing its boundaries to expand the concept. There were lots of examples where authors would use platicás as well as data collection to research specific ideas. Members from the audience commented that it “builds relationships with people in the communities, allows them to open up to the researcher,” and “opens a different level of communication.”
