Enrique G. Murillo, Jr.

Enrique G. Murillo, Jr., Ph.D. is a tenured faculty member for the Educational Research Methods and Foundations in Education position at California State University San Bernardino. He is a first generation Chicano, born and raised in the greater East side of Los Angeles (Huntington Park), and a native bilingual speaker in Spanish/English.

He has successfully served during the last 2 decades in the capacity of a school teacher, a student, a counselor, a social-service worker, a community organizer, a director/consultant in various community-based projects, a lecturer, a manager and editor for several academic journals, a researcher, and a university instructor.

Dr. Murillo completed his Ph.D. in the Social Foundations of Education program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). His master's degree from Cal State Los Angeles is in the same area, with coursework toward the bilingual multiple-subject teaching credential. He offers both a generalist background in education and schooling, with cognate disciplines in sociology and anthropology. His specialty areas include foundations of education, research methods, critical ethnography, educational anthropology and cultural studies.

In addition, Enrique has prior teaching experience at the university, elementary school, and adult education levels. Prior to CSUSB, he taught Schooling and Diversity: Anthropological Perspectives at UNC, and Foundations of Education at Meredith College, with both undergraduate and graduate level students. Previously, he taught elementary school for three years as a multiple-subject instructor for the Los Angeles Unified School District. He taught in the inner-city South-Central area, with primary responsibility of full bilingual instruction in a self-contained classroom.

Prior to that, he served for five years as coordinator and instructor in various community-based organizations offering adult ESL/Literacy/Civics instruction as required by the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. The most rewarding aspects of this experience, according to Dr. Murillo, were developing the operations at 22 school sites, supervising a staff of more than 65 instructors, and designing culturally-relevant curricula for Spanish-speaking immigrants.

With UNC faculty and fellow students, he's had the opportunity to work and collaborate on several research projects. In 1995-1996, he was part of the 12 member research team, contracted by the Kenan Institute to document the "A+" arts-enhanced curriculum at 27 NC public schools. During the same year, Dr. Murillo served as the managing editor to The Urban Review, a peer-reviewed academic journal on issues and ideas on public education.

He has also conducted research in several community-based organizations organizing cultural celebrations for newly-arrived Latino immigrants, dealing specifically with issues of identity, diversity, and socialization rituals in the planning and performances of these cultural festivals. Additionally, he has conducted documentary research in a collaborative project with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke and was awarded a research stipend from the Southern Oral History Project to conduct oral history interviews in the new, stable, and permanent first generation Latino immigrant community in NC. His oral history work was honored both as the basis for a video project, as well as accepted for permanent archival collection on the history of the South.

From January 1997 through June 1998, he served as a research associate for the North Carolina Public Spheres project, a collaborative, National Science Foundation (NSF) funded research project. As one of a 9-person research team, he served as full-time site-ethnographer for one of 5 NC counties undergoing economic restructuring. His dissertation work, coming out of this project, examines "dramas of contestation," which is the term collaboratively chosen by the team to describe conflicts in the public sphere (or local problems) over the utilization and distribution of resources.

Dr. Murillo has been the recipient of the 2004 Outstanding Advisor of the Year Award, the 2003 Outstanding Professor of the Year Award, the California State University Forgivable Loan, the National Hispanic Scholarship Fund, and the Southern Oral History Award. In 2000 he was awarded the prestigious "Outstanding Dissertation Award" from Phi Delta Kappa.

He has published numerous articles in various academic journals including Educational Foundations, The Urban Review, Journal of Thought, Educational Studies, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, and the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. He is co-author and co-editor of three books, Downsizing Democracy: Estrangement and Engagement in Local Politics in North Carolina with NYU Press, Education, Policy, and The Politics of Identity in The New Latino Diaspora with Ablex Press, and Playgrounds in Post-Critical Ethnography with Hampton Press.

Dr. Murillo currently teaches EELB 312 / ESEC 321 "Culture and Schooling" and EELB 313 "Pedagogical Foundations of English Language Learners" in the credential courses, EDUC 605 "Foundations of Education" and EDUC 603 "Intro to Educational Research" in the Masters Core curriculum, and EELB 612 "Social and Cultural Context of Learning" for the Bilingual Cross-Cultural Masters Program. He has served on the Educational Leadership Council, Ad-Hoc Committee to Revise and Update the Masters Core, the NCATE/CCTC Accreditation Committee, the Review-Promotion-Tenure (RPT) Committee, and is a member of The Center for Equity in Education. Additionally, he has served as the faculty advisor for various student organizations, including Lambda Theta Phi and M.E.Ch.A..

Dr. Murillo is a member of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the American Educational Studies Association (AESA), and the American Anthropological Association (AAA). He is a peer-reviewer for The Urban Review, The High School Journal, and the University of Oklahoma Press. He serves on the editorial board for Educational Foundations and The Initiative Anthology Journal and is currently the California Representative of the Committee on Academic Standards and Accreditation (CASA), which informs the CLSE Standards and ultimately NCATE Standards for the field.

Most recently he has been working both with the Los Angeles County Office of Education as a Professional Expert, and with Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Publishing Company where he serves as the founding Editor for the Journal of Latinos and Education.