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A testimonio reveals the bridges and connections created by collective learning. For many Xicanas, the first learning occurs in their home. Studies show that the familia encourages life lessons through daily chores, conversation about school and education, advice from grandparents, sibling interaction, and by watching parents or elders negotiate and interact with the dominant society and among other family members. This research in home-learning practices provides valuable data in understanding the successes and challenges of Xicanas in higher education. Ultimately, testimonio presents a unique method, process, and product that uncovers the many daily challenges that Xicanas confront. The purpose of this chapter is to draw attention to the fact that testimonio and storytelling does and can play an important role in the life and work of Xicanas in higher education. The chapter outlines the framework and theoretical lens of mestiza consciousness and pedagogies of the home as the foundation for storytelling through interviews and platicas identified as testimonio. The study conducted is an autoethnography that details the significance of storytelling through testimonio as a method of survival in higher education. Testimonio and storytelling are central to the field of critical race theory, Xicana feminism, and social justice education which stresses the significance of Being authentic to Self.

Marginalization exists in many organizations, despite a zero-tolerance stance on discrimination, abuse and harassment. Human resource development (HRD) professionals are increasingly asked to respond to the calls for crucial conversations on race and diversity. However, traditional HRD methods and tools may not be sufficient to address and eradicate racism in the workplace. The usage of testimonio could enable oppressed groups to communicate their narratives to counter stereotypes. This paper aims to describe testimonio and the various ways it can be used as a research methodology and to perturb the dominant practices in the workplace.

This conceptual paper uses testimonio, a narrative methodology with Latin American roots in indigenous oral storytelling, to expand beyond Eurocentric qualitative approaches to capture the voices of marginalized groups. This study gives examples and theorizes how leaders, including human resource professionals, may use this approach to give voice to underrepresented stakeholders in the margins of organizations. Testimonio serves as a non-Eurocentric framework and venue to legitimize their stories. Their voices are assets, enriching while transforming and perturbing and so are needed for communities and organizations to foster a just and sustainable culture and climate.

The use of testimonio as an HRD approach to amplify unrepresented voices in the workplace may be an asset to HRD professionals. However, to realize the full potential of this research tradition in HRD, researchers and practitioners must create more space where trust is present for these groups to tell stories that matter most to them.

This study on the testimonio approach provides a view into organizational power dynamics and voices from the margins. It serves as a means to acknowledge the voices of underrepresented stakeholders in the workplace. HRD scholars should contribute to organizational effectiveness and inclusive workplace climate by using scholarship to highlight the harm of marginalizing policies and behaviors.

Testimonio implies that HRD practitioners in positions of privilege should use their authority to foreground the voices of marginalized individuals who are typically silenced. This can be accomplished by prioritizing unheard voices in the work of HRD professionals. Testimonio as a methodological approach and workplace tool highlights the personal experiences of oppressed groups who experience social injustice, particularly racism. This method encourages organizations that do not operate in a culturally sensitive and inclusive environment to reconsider the discourse that influences their social position.

While there is a clear need to address inequities, few practical inquiry tools are presented. Moreover, through their epistemologies and research procedures, scholars and practitioners may unintentionally maintain and reinforce existing inequitable structures and processes. This paper presents testimonio as a non-Western alternative to Eurocentric qualitative research methodologies to perturb dominant practices in HRD.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight various ways in which micro-aggressions and other forms of institutional oppression have affected subaltern professors and students in the academy.

This qualitative case study draws from testimonios collected from fall 2010 to spring 2016. Six testimonios are incorporated in the study, and they stem from a various set of data. These testimonios show patterns across data set regarding systemic oppression subaltern that professors have experienced in the academy.

As the findings of this study show, subaltern professors face intersecting forms of discrimination – often race, language, accent, gender, and class based – in predominantly white institutions. Their testimonios unravel the complexity of the professional, academic, and personal lives of these professors highlighting their professional achievements and successes. Their testimonios demonstrate at the same time the ways in which various forms of oppression might have limited their life chances and opportunities.

Suggestions are made as to how social justice educators and policy makers can collectively challenge and eradicate these social wrongs.

This paper is an original take on both micro-aggressions and institutional oppression affecting subaltern professors and students.

In September 2014, 1,200 unaccompanied immigrant youth, from a region of Central America known for high rates of violence and homicide, enrolled in a suburban school district of New York State. This paper aims to highlight the stories of the newly arrived Central American high school youth, as told through Bilingual (Spanish/English) digital testimonios completed in the English Language Arts classroom. The author examines how the telling of their stories of surviving migration offers a way for the youth to respond to political and emotional struggles. The author also explores how the youth become active participants in the telling of political narratives/testimonios.

Part of a larger ethnographic case study, the author adopts the ethnographic approaches of the new literacy studies. Testimonios as a research epistemology privilege the youth’s narratives as sources of knowledge, and allow the youth to reclaim their authority in telling their own stories.

The integration of critical digital texts into the English Language Arts classroom created a participatory classroom culture where the Central American youth’s digital testimonios can be seen as a shared history of struggles that make visible the physical toil of their journeys, the truth of their border crossings and their enactments of political identities. As a collective, the youth’s stories become part of national and global political dialogues.

At a time when immigrant youth struggle for rights, to further their education and to negotiate the daily experiences of living in a new country, this research offers a unique perspective on the politics of inclusion and exclusion for unaccompanied youth.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how I – and many other students – became first-generation college students (FGCSs) by exploring the rise and retraction of TRIO. Originally, TRIO was a set of three college access and retention programs created in the 1960s to address the needs of a population designated as academically and economically disadvantaged. The author uses the term “becoming” as a process of how a person is constructed socially, in this case, as a FGCS and faculty member. The author uses. social construction of targeted populations theory to explore my testimonio as a beneficiary of opportunity programs.

To explore how FGCS experience policy changes affecting TRIO, I use my testimonio to build on the historical literature that covers 1968–2001. I begin my testimonio by first reviewing my background as a second generation Ecuadorian American. I then review how I encountered opportunity programs and why I continued to be a participant in these programs, specifically, TRIO. I end my testimonio by countering criticism of TRIO programs using research on and lived experiences with TRIO.

During an era when TRIO budgets remain under constant attack, testimonios shed light on participants’ experiences with policy changes. Specifically, I reveal how economic budget cuts create policy changes to terms such as “academically and economically disadvantaged” and shapes perceptions and knowledge about who are FGCS.

Research limitations include application of social construction of targeted group theory to one testimonio. Implications include more studies on how policy changes, specifically budget allocations could affect characterizations and images of targeted populations such as FGCS.

Understanding the role of policy changes to TRIO program funding benefits students from misperceptions by educational administrators and other stakeholders.

My testimonio also builds on work regarding the impacts of CARPS on FGCS like me. Most importantly, my testimonio contributes to the efforts necessary to ensure these programs continue to exist and succeed. I use my testimonio side by side with research literature on TRIO to become both the subject of inquiry and the inquirer, simultaneously a beneficiary and an informant of how these programs have influenced my persistence through the postsecondary education system and shaped my understanding of FGCS.

Replicating colonization at Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) must be addressed from the root, structurally. At New Mexico State University (NMSU) the authors are aimed to commit to going beyond counting and enrolling, to center servingness.

HSIs will continue to struggle in fulfilling their mission, especially given the fast-growing Latina/e/o/x populations in the United States (US). A major challenge all HSIs face is the contrasting demographics between the student population, the faculty and staff and the administration – with HSI administrations consistently being predominantly White.

Hence, in this piece the authors shed light on the important work the authors have done these last two years through collaborative efforts to transform the institution and center servingness. Judith as the Interim Director of Chicano Programs, and Linda as the inaugural Vice President for equity, inclusion and diversity.

Herein, the authors now share about the genre of testimonio as a decolonial methodology and about the experiences in our work as we attempt to decolonize the praxis at an HSI.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a qualitative research method for which the empirical material is drawn from the experience of a practitioner-researcher.

First, a review of other autobiographical methods is made to show that the proposed method offers something different. Subsequently, it briefly outlines the epistemological and theoretical anchors that guided the development of the proposed method. Then it follows the path and the peculiarities of this method. And finally a few guidelines are presented for the legitimization of the knowledge generated, illustrated by an example.

The proposed method is aimed at experienced practitioners who are involved in a process of scientific research. Ideally, it is carried out with a co-searcher.

A new method of qualitative research to explore new avenues in management science.

Narrative inquiry and life history are privileged methods for studying people's lives, experiences, and identity construction. In this article, I argue that critical life history inquiry is especially suitable for studies of those, who have actively involved in progressive social and cultural movements and have developed an identity as activist educators.

The average woman educator spends more time in the classroom than their male counterpart before ascending to an administrator position. Women educators spends on average 10–11 years as a teacher and as an administrator before becoming promoted to the superintendent position (Kingsberry & Jean-Marie, 2018; Manuel & Slate, 2003; Robinson, Shakeshaft, Grogan, & Newcomb, 2017). However, when they do reach this position, women superintendents lead in a different manner than men. They tend to focus on the well-being of children and families. They bring a strong interest in educating the child as a whole and place those at high risk a priority (Grogan, 2005). Women are finding way(s) to bring women's way(s) of knowing and expertise into this position. Women tend to keep instruction at the forefront and develop relationships with school and wider community members that can help foster the academic and social growth of the student (Grogan, 2005; Robinson et al., 2017; Wilmore, 2008).

Therefore, feminist@ leaders surface from their feminist and cultural knowledge (Sanchez & Ek, 2013) as a form of traditional resistance. They create pathways for other Latinas on their journey to claim Chicana feminism. As such, this chapter highlights the voices of four valiant women of color leaders on the path toward the superintendency whose personal and professional pathways intersect to create a feminist@ leadership identity.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a collection of articles that explore some of the many innovative approaches to qualitative inquiry and to challenge HRD scholars and practitioners to consider using innovative approaches in their work. In doing so, qualitative research in HRD can better capture and honour voices, experiences and meaning making of individuals, teams, organizations and communities.

Using Lê and Schmid’s (2022) definition of innovation in qualitative research, the authors selected four innovative approaches to qualitative research that have the potential to enhance HRD research and practice: use of multiple-case study designs in case study research in HRD, a new take on critical incident technique, a narrative approach of testimonio and a visual approach of participant photography.

Innovative approaches to qualitative research in this special issue include a review of case study research in HRD by Tkachenko et al., a new take on the familiar critical incident technique of Watkins et al., a narrative approach to testimonio by Salcedo et al. and a visual approach to participant photography by Hurtienne et al. The last article, by Grenier et al., addresses the implications of these articles to the field of HRD and points to additional directions for innovative qualitative approaches that can help to understand and create more inclusive, democratic and just organizations.

The articles in this special issue are intended to spark a dialogue about the meaning of innovation in qualitative research in HRD. It also can serve as an impetus for considering how innovative approaches to qualitative research can better tackle questions that come from the new normal of the workplace, society and diverse contexts.

This special issue will give HRD scholars and practitioners a realistic, practical view on how innovation in qualitative research can help in exploring specific problems in the workplace. The articles will offer a glimpse into how specific social complex issues can be explored and addressed through innovative approaches, new and tried/modified, to qualitative inquiry.

Four articles introduce new and tried/modified qualitative methods, and their value is in prompting HRD scholars and practitioners to consider some of the innovative approaches in exploring, understanding and transforming the workplace. The final article is a review of more innovative qualitative approaches for HRD scholars and practitioners to understand complex organizational phenomena and promote positive and inclusive change accordingly.