Blanca Caldas

Blanca Caldas Chumbes is an Associate Professor in Multilingual Education and Elementary Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the College of Education and Human Development, University of Minnesota Twin Cities. She earned her Ph.D. in 2016 from the University of Texas at Austin in the Bilingual/Bicultural Program of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, with a graduate portfolio in Mexican-American and Latina/o Studies. Her dissertation, Performing the Advocate Bilingual Teacher: Drama-based Interventions for Future Story-making, received the Activist Research Grant Initiative Award sponsored by multiple centers at the University of Texas at Austin, including the Social Justice Institute, the Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, the Teresa Lozano Long Institute for Latin America, the Center for Mexican American Studies, and the Center for Gender and Women’s Studies. She holds an M.Ed. in Bilingual Education from Boise State University, where she co-founded the Literacy sin Fronteras Initiative to address achievement gaps among Latino English language learner students through biliteracy camps. She received her B.A. in Education from Universidad Federico Villarreal. Prior to her academic career, she worked as an ESL/EFL teacher for 11 years.

Her research specializations include bilingual education, preservice bilingual and language teacher education, minoritized language practices and pedagogies, critical pedagogy, Spanish for bilingual teachers, oral narratives and testimonio, critical discourse analysis, participatory action research, and critical performance ethnography. She has presented her work, including ethnographic performances, at local, regional, national, and international conferences and has published in both English and Spanish. Key publications include TLESSS: Filling the Ethnic Studies Gap in Bilingual Teacher Education in the Midwest (2024), On Pluriversal Dreamscapes: A Manifesto for Surdo Futurities in the Language of Education and Scholarship (2024), Becoming an ‘Avocado’ – Embodied Rescriptings in Bilingual Teacher Education Settings: A Critical Performance Ethnography (2022), “We’re All in This Boat Together”: Latina/Chicana Embodied Pedagogies of Care (2020), and The Boal-Freire Nexus: Rehearsing Praxis, Imagining Liberation in Bilingual Teacher Education (2020). She is a recipient of the 2021 Early Career Award from the AERA Bilingual Education Research Special Interest Group, the 2020 Douglas Foley Early Career Award from the Council on Anthropology and Education, and was part of the 2016-2018 National Council of Teachers of English Research Foundation Cultivating New Voices Among Scholars of Color Fellowship cohort.