April 2024
The 2024 AERA Distinguished Lecture and the 2024 Wallace Foundation Distinguished Lecture were given during the Annual Meeting in Philadelphia by two prominent scholars. While topically diverse, each gave attendees much to think about in disrupting taken-for-granted assumptions and raising issues driving future research.
The 2024 Distinguished Lecture was delivered by Gloria J. Ladson-Billings, professor emerita in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, on Friday, April 12. Ladson-Billings’s lecture, “‘Not Yet at Plessy’: 70 Years Post-Brown,” addressed the progress that still must be made following the 70-year anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. The session was chaired by then AERA President Tyrone C. Howard (University of California, Los Angeles).
Ladson-Billings argued that very little progress toward achieving Brown’s promise has occurred.
In documenting the sudden loss of teachers, administrators, and quality Black schools because of Brown, Ladson-Billings stated that “Brown was not without cost . . . it is not as if Brown is all upside.”
“We are misled when we are mis-read,” said Ladson-Billings.
Ladson-Billings noted that Brown is an enduring myth that is taught as an important symbol that continues to shape ideas about justice and equality and established the Supreme Court’s authority and power—but that there is a reality of Brown’s failure.
“Fifty-four percent of U.S. public school students attend segregated schools, and trends toward privatization will only serve to exacerbate these figures. It’s likely to get worse,” said Ladson-Billings.
In quoting Howard John Wesley, Ladson-Billings summed up why Brown has not fulfilled its promise: “Never underestimate the hypocritical lengths the privileged will go to, to protect itself.”
The 2024 Wallace Foundation Distinguished Lecture, also chaired by Howard, was given by Dolores Delgado Bernal, professor in the School of Education at Loyola Marymount University, on Sunday, April 14. In her lecture, “Disrupting Dominant Research Paradigms: A Collective Journey to Chicana/Latina Feminista Methodologies,” Delgado Bernal provided a clearer understanding of feminista methodologies.
Delgado Bernal began her lecture by sharing her epistemological grounding, contextualized by the work of Chicana philosopher, writer, and theorist Gloria Anzaldúa, as well as her family’s experiences and history.
“Oral histories led me to a family history that was impacted by the racist psychological and behavioral research of the 1920s and 30s that found Mexican families like mine to be seen as uneducable,” said Delgado Bernal. “Those pseudo-scientific studies along with social, economic, and cultural rationalizations were the basis for racist practices that kept my family in segregated Mexican schools, pushed them out of schools, or forced them into Americanization programs.”
Delgado Bernal then discussed how she began to articulate a paradigm shift, drawing from Strauss and Corbin’s construct of “theoretical sensitivity” to formulate the concept of cultural intuition, an evolving concept that is the basis of a feminista epistemological framework.
“I operationalized cultural intuition as something that is achieved and can be nurtured through our personal experiences, ancestral wisdom, community memory, professional experience, the literature on and about Chicanas, and the analytical process we engage in when we are in a central position of our research and our analysis,” said Delgado Bernal.
Following an overview of two feminista methodologies, pláticas (conversations) and critical race feminista praxis, Delgado Bernal concluded by thanking the scholars whose collective body of research has advanced anti-racist research agendas.
Recordings of these lectures will be available on the AERA website and YouTube channel.