Olá! My name is Mariana Hernandes Grassi, a Latina doctoral student from Brazil at Loyola University Chicago and an alumna of the GEDI 22 cohort (also known as the Sisterhood of Healing Change). Having recently wrapped up my GEDI (Graduate Education Diversity Internship) fellowship last month, I’m reflecting on how my decade-plus background as a language educator shapes my emerging evaluation practice. Today, I’m sharing how using pláticas, a methodology more prominent in educational research settings, transformed my recent evaluation work at my GEDI host site, supporting predominantly Chicanx staff at a non-medical home care agency as they prepared for a high-stakes healthcare accreditation survey.
Pláticas are informal conversations deeply connected to Hispanic and Latinx oral traditions of sharing stories, emotional support, and wisdom. In the 1970s, Latinx researchers began utilizing pláticas as an effective method to engage marginalized participants and collect data in ways that honored their lived realities, focusing on researcher-participant connection and reciprocity. Seeking to conceptualize pláticas as a methodology that shifts research from an extractive process to a relational space for co-constructing knowledge and equity, Fierros and Delgado Bernal identified five principles among scholars engaging with pláticas in their work.
Lessons Learned: Applying the 5 Principles of Plática Methodology to My GEDI Project
In my GEDI experience, adopting pláticas shifted the work at my host site from an “objective” audit preparation to a tool for empowerment. Here are lessons I learned applying the five principles at my host site:
1. Grounded in Chicana and Latina Feminist Theory: Preparing for accreditation was a mandate from the host site leadership. Grounding the evaluation approach in critical feminist theory allowed us to center the staff (who are predominantly Chicanx) by valuing their experiences and opinions as essential knowledge to counterbalance that top-down imposition.
2. Honoring Participants as Co-Constructors of Knowledge: Rather than treating staff as data sources, we created an accreditation preparation committee with members from multiple departments. Our monthly committee meetings invited staff to draw upon their daily expertise to co-design a localized logic model and a strategic accreditation preparation roadmap.
3. Connecting Lived Experiences to Research Inquiry: By welcoming everyday life into the evaluation, flexible conversations helped us uncover how administrative understaffing impacted staff well-being, directly affecting survey readiness.
4. Providing a Potential Space for Healing: Grounded in relational care, judgment-free spaces allowed staff to unburden challenges and speak openly about burnout, transforming administrative anxiety into collective relief.
5. Driven by Reflexivity, Reciprocity, and Vulnerability: Reflecting on my positionality as a Brazilian language educator and emerging evaluator allowed me to identify shared and distinct cultural aspects with Chicanx staff. Sharing food from our respective cultures during our pláticas was an effective strategy that opened space to ground our interactions in mutual care and trust, deepening the understanding of our similarities and differences. Furthermore, showing vulnerability about my own learning curve in the home care industry did not weaken my credibility; it created space for staff to recognize just how indispensable their everyday institutional knowledge was to our evaluation process.
Hence, when applying the five principles of a plática methodology to my GEDI work, I found that, by design, I had to reject outsiderness and embrace fluid, relational roles. When we utilize pláticas, we do not just collect data; we honor lived experiences, shift power dynamics, and bring the heart of Culturally Responsive Evaluation to life.
Rad Resources: Some Key Articles to Dive Deeper into Pláticas
- Check out Fierros and Delgado Bernal’s 2016 seminal article on the conceptualization of pláticas as a methodology.
- Learn more practical implications of pláticas in different contexts through Regina Ayala Chavez’s 2025 article.
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