Colleen Holbrook - Spanish Instructor

Colleen Holbrook was born in San Francisco, CA and was raised in and around Vancouver, WA. She started learning Spanish in seventh grade as she had an early interest in travel and hoped to be able to use her new language skills abroad, and she quickly discovered a love for the language. Her interest in Spanish only grew and she ended up completing her bachelor’s degree at Saint Louis University at its campus in Madrid, Spain, after which she spent three years living in Columbia, where she studied Panhispanic linguistics at La Universidad de la Sabana, Chia, Colombia. In 2022 she graduated with a master’s degree in Hispanic Lexicography from the Real Academia Española and Universidad de León in Spain.

She became inspired to be able to share the language with others and give them the opportunity to connect with people from other cultures, and thus pursued teaching Spanish. Colleen is an interactive and adaptive instructor who aims to cater her classes to her students’ needs, interests, and abilities. She hopes to inspire a positive attitude about learning Spanish in which everyone understands that people learn at different paces and that learning another language can be fun and playful.  She also enjoys introducing students to the rich cultural heritage of Spanish-speaking countries and inviting them to learn more on their own.

Colleen has been teaching at Tierra since 2017. She deeply appreciates that Tierra students often come with a strong intention and willingness to learn. She enjoys the small class sizes which allow for frequent student participation and abundant teacher support.

Along with teaching at Tierra, she works as an interpreter and enjoys the different ways she gets to interact with the Spanish language in her professional life. Colleen’s other love is horses and she is an accomplished equestrian, so she dedicates as much time as she can outside work to riding horses. And of course, when she gets the chance, she continues to travel.