Wendy Barrales, Teaching and Learning
Wendy Barrales, PhD, is an interdisciplinary scholar-activist and Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Teaching and Learning at NYU. As a daughter of formerly undocumented Mexican immigrants and a first-generation college student, Dr. Barrales brings a unique perspective by merging art, archiving, and digital storytelling rooted in lived experience as legitimized knowledge and theory. She is the founder of the award-winning Women of Color Archive (WOCArchive), an intergenerational art-based storytelling project that preserves, documents, and amplifies the experiences of women of color. She received her B.A. in Education from Cal State University, Los Angeles, M.A. in Literacy Education from NYU, and Ph.D. in Urban Education from The Graduate Center - CUNY where she published a multimodal dissertation, on the invisibilized stories of women, searching for mami & abuelita.
In 2016, Dr. Barrales was the founding Adviser of Curriculum and Design of an all-girls STEM high school in Brooklyn, where she was the inaugural chair of Ethnic Studies. After a decade as a public school teacher, Dr. Barrales continues to support educators through the Computer Science for All initiative, as an Induction Mentor at Teachers College, Columbia University, and facilitating workshops on political education with the New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCORE).
At NYU, Dr. Barrales works alongside Black and Latinx youth and educators to co-design learning spaces that support the development of positive self-identities for historically marginalized students in the field of science. Inspired by bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldúa, and her own mami and abuelita’s invisibilized stories, Dr. Barrales’ research interests include feminist pedagogies, participatory archiving, women’s oral histories as knowledge production, and digital art exhibitions as intergenerational sites of learning. Her work has been awarded by the American Association of University Women, The National Science Foundation, the Center for the Humanities, the George Lucas Educational Foundation, and the National Women’s Studies Association.
Selected Publications
- Barrales, W., (forthcoming). Ethnic Studies Pedagogies Journal. Intergenerational
storytelling as a public art praxis.
- Barrales, W., Hunt, V., Martinez-Alvarez, P., Sanchez, M.T., Klein, T., (2024). 10
years at Dos Puentes. University Collaborations: Service and Research Projects.
- Mangual Figueroa, A., & Barrales, W. (2024). Ethics of Departure. Bloomsbury Encyclopedia on Social Justice in Education. Bloomsbury Publishing.
- Barrales, W. (2023) Nuancing Latinidad Through Visual Testimonios in a Women of
Color Archive: Latina Girls and Matriarchs as Knowledge Producers. Latinx Interdisciplinary Perspectives SAGE Publishing.
- Mangual Figueroa, A., & Barrales, W. (2021) Testimonio and Counterstorytelling by Immigrant-Origin Children and Youth: Insights That Amplify Immigrant Subjectivities.
Societies,11(2), 38. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc11020038
- Badhey K., Barrales, W., Guerrero, N., (2020) Connecting Through Time: Intergenerational Family Storytelling. Photoville. https://photoville.com/projects/connecting-through-time/
- Barrales, W. (Contributor). (2020, February 25). BIPOC: Navigating Grad School
[Audio podcast episode]. In Abolition Science. Retrieved from https://www.abolitionscience.org/home/2020/2/25/bipoc-navigating-grad-school