Blanca Caldas Chumbes

Blanca Caldas is an assistant professor in Multilingual Education and Elementary Education—College of Education and Human Development at The University of Minnesota Twin Cities. She completed her Ph.D. (2016) at The University of Texas at Austin in the Bilingual/Bicultural Program in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction with a graduate portfolio in Mexican-American and Latina/o Studies. Her dissertation titled Performing the Advocate Bilingual Teacher: Drama-based Interventions for Future Story-making was awarded the Activist Research Grant Initiative Award, sponsored by the Social Justice Institute, the Warfield Center for African and African American Studies; Teresa Lozano Long Institute for Latin America, the Center for Mexican American Studies, and the Center for Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Dr. Caldas is part of the 2016-2018 cohort of the National Council of Teachers of English Research Foundation Cultivating New Voices Among Scholars of Color Fellowship. She completed her B.A. in Education at Universidad Federico Villarreal in Lima-Peru and worked as an ESL/EFL teacher for 11 years. She obtained an MEd in Bilingual education at Boise State University where she co-founded the Literacy sin Fronteras Initiative, a project that aimed at closing the achievement gap among Latino ELL students through biliteracy camps. She has presented at local, regional, national, and international conferences (including ethnographic performances of her work), and published work in both English and Spanish.

Awards

• 2021: Early Career Award, AERA Bilingual Education Research SIG
• 2020: Douglas Foley Early Career Award, CAE