Natalia Benjamin

Natalia Alvarez Benjamin taught high school Ethnic Studies and Multilingual Learners and now works as the Director for Multilingual Learning for her school district. She is dually licensed in K-12 ESL and reading, and was named the 2021 Minnesota Teacher of the Year. She also holds a National Board Teaching Certification in English as New Language (Early Adolescence through Young Adulthood).

Natalia is passionate about the liberation of marginalized students and focuses on advocacy for multilingual/multicultural education, identity work, Heritage Speakers, language justice, and student-centered humanizing pedagogies. She is committed to teacher development, has taught a course for educators on Race and Ethnic Studies in Heritage/Bilingual education at UW-Whitewater as a guest professor, and a course on Planning, Assessment, and Instruction for Multilingual Learners for the University of Minnesota. She shares many practical examples for teachers to enact these practices in the book she co-authored: Language of Identity, Language of Access: Liberatory Learning for Multilingual Classrooms (Corwin, 2024).