Claudia Garcia-Rueda received her Master’s degrees in Spanish Language and Culture Education and English Literature and Linguistics from the University of Granada, Spain. She is originally from Colombia and has been a language instructor in the United States and abroad for eight years. Before joining CLIC at Rice University, she taught all levels of Spanish courses at Wake Technical Community College in Raleigh, NC, where she received several awards and obtained the highest student retention rate in the department. As an instructor, she strives to inspire and guide her students to develop their linguistic knowledge along with their cultural awareness so they can be active members of a multicultural and multilingual world.

She is interested in second language acquisition, language pedagogy, bilingualism, and applied linguistics.