Katie Kinsella

Hi!

My name is Katie Kinsella and I am currently a Fulbright scholar living in Cali, Colombia. I'm teaching English at Universidad del Valle and I'm also working on my own social project helping to empower the marginalized Afro-Colombian populations.

My love of Latin America first originated when I was 16 years old on a missions trip to Guatemala. Ever since then, I went on to study International Development and Latin American Studies at UCLA, I studied Spanish abroad in Barcelona at Universitat Pompea Fabra, I worked at a school in Nicaragua, and went on a Global Medical Brigade in Honduras.

Following graduation from UCLA, I had the opportunity to teach high school English in Coquimbo, Chile with the United Nations Development Program and Chilean Ministry of Education's "English Opens Doors" program. My Chilean students taught me so much about the human will to persevere against all odds. While in Chile, I started a street tennis program in the low-income barrios and I worked at an orphanage called Hogar Redes.

After a year of living out my Chilean dream, I came back to the United States to enter into UCSD's Masters of Education and Teaching Credential Program. It was at UCSD that my passion for bilingual education grew tremendously. One week after graduate school, I got a job teaching English Language Development to native Spanish speakers at a middle school called King Chavez in Barrio Logan, San Diego.

And now I have the opportunity of a lifetime to be a Fulbright Scholar in a new, unchartered territory for me: Colombia!