DR. ALICIA HERRERA

Dr. Alicia Herrera is an Assistant Professor in the Child and Adolescent Development program at Sacramento State. Her research examines racial and professional identity development, with a focus on antiracist ideological commitment across ecological systems. She studies how professionals and pre-professionals interpret developmental theory and make sense of race and power in practice.

WHAT'S THE TOPIC OF YOUR PRESENTATION?

Co-authored book integrating ecological developmental frameworks and antiracist praxis into professional preparation in child and adolescent development fields.

WHY IS THIS TOPIC IMPORTANT?

Developmental theory has long structured professional preparation across fields concerned with children, adolescents, and families. When race and power are treated as background context rather than structuring forces, interpretation often defaults to individual-level explanations. Integrating ecological reasoning with explicit attention to race and power deepens how professionals understand behavior, policy, identity development, and their own location within professional systems.

HOW DOES THIS WORK FIT WITHIN YOUR BROADER RESEARCH PROGRAM AND/OR WORK AS FACULTY MEMBER?

Whether teaching a race and ethnicity graduation requirement course or advising graduate research projects, I see how students are learning to apply ecological theory to everyday professional judgments, where terms such as “kindergarten readiness” and “developmentally appropriate” may appear neutral but carry ecological and racial implications. The book emerged from this work, integrating ecological reasoning and antiracist praxis to support more structurally attuned interpretation in practice.

WHAT DO YOU HOPE THE AUDIENCE WILL TAKE AWAY FROM YOUR PRESENTATION?

I hope the audience leaves with a renewed appreciation for how ecological reasoning functions as an interpretive tool in everyday practice. When race and power are mapped across multidirectional systems and historical time, developmental theory becomes an analytic tool rather than a static model, shifting our questions from “What is wrong here?” to “How is this being produced, and where am I located within it?”

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