Dr. Anaida Colon Muniz

Anaida Colón-Muñiz attended Harpur College, Binghamton University (B.S. 1973), Bank Street College of Education (M.S. 1974), and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (Ed.D. 1983). After a semester at the University of Salamanca, Spain (1971), she did two independent research studies in Puerto Rico (1972). She completed her administrative credential from California State University, Fullerton (1985), a fellowship with the Education Policy Fellowship Program (IEL, 1991), and the Spanish Children's Literature Institute, University of Madrid Complutense, sponsored in cooperation between the Spanish Ministry of Education and the California Department of Education (1991). In 2017 she was appointed School Development Consultant of Dong An Experimental School Attached to Northeast Normal University in Changchun, China.

Anaida began her 47-year education career in New York City as a bilingual teacher and, later, teacher educator for a federally funded Trilingual Education Professional Development Grant and the City School District. She then served two State Departments of Education in New York and Massachusetts. During her doctoral studies, she became a bilingual resource teacher in Holyoke, Massachusetts, for one of the first dual language programs in the country. Moving to California, she worked for two major federal Title VII grants at California State University, Fullerton and San Diego State University. She was bilingual administrator for three Southern California school districts including Rowland Heights, Orange Unified, and Santa Ana Unified, developing bilingual programs of excellence, providing state of the art professional development, attaining millions of dollars in grants, monitoring program quality, and ensuring that students, teachers, administrators, and parents were supported.

Anaida joined the Chapman University faculty in 1999 and retired with emeritus status in 2020. She continues to serve on PhD committees and in the Paulo Freire Democratic Project. For 20 years, she served in various roles in the Attallah College of Educational Studies. She first coordinated and taught in the Multiple Subject Credential and Master of Arts in Teaching programs for 13 years and later taught in the PhD program. She also served as director of community education at Centro Comunitario de Educación in Santa Ana for seven years.

While at Chapman, her research interests included bilingual education, language policy in education, critical multicultural teacher education, and issues of civil rights in education affecting Latino youth. Her publications include Memories of Paulo Freire (2010) and Latino Civil Rights in Education: La lucha sigue (2016). She speaks and consults on critical bilingual multicultural education and community education.

She has served as national president for the National Conference of Puerto Rican Women (2006-2008) and is currently the SoCal chapter president. She also served as president for the California Association for Bilingual Education (1998-2002). She was on the board of the Orange County Children’s Therapeutic Arts Center for eight years until 2008. A key consultant in the development of El Sol Science and Arts Academy, an award-winning dual language school in Santa Ana, California, she is now on its board. She is on the board of the California Council of Teacher Educators and is a California delegate for Drexel University’s Vision 2020, National Women’s Equality Initiative.