Lisa García Bedolla is Berkeley's Vice Provost for Graduate Studies and Dean of the Graduate Division, and a Professor in the Graduate School of Education. She uses the tools of social science to reveal the causes of educational and political inequalities in the United States, considering differences across the lines of ethnorace, gender, class, geography, et cetera. She believes an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach is critical to recognizing the complexity of the contemporary United States. She has used a variety of social science methods – participant observation, in-depth interviewing, survey research, field experiments, and geographic information systems (GIS) – to shed light on this question.
Professor García Bedolla earned her PhD in political science from Yale University and her BA in Latin American Studies and Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley.
Achievement issues, at-risk youth, bilingual education, cultural studies, democratic education, diversity, educational equity, ethnic issues, gender equity, history of education, immigrant issues, minorities, multicultural education, participatory research, politics of school structure and governance, public engagement, qualitative methods, school-university collaboration, service learning and experiential education, urban schooling