The Department of Spanish & Portuguese is pleased to share that Felipe Moraga is the recipient of one of this year’s campus-wide Innovation in Teaching Awards! This is the second time Felipe has been recognized with such an award. In 2021, he received the L&S Continuity of Instruction Teaching Award.
Felipe excels in creating activities and projects that center around the student and foster their agency and creativity, empower them, and help them find intrinsic motivation to pay attention, participate, and experiment. He feels students learn best when their instructor makes the class relevant and considers their unique talents and learning preferences. He builds community and engages his students in active learning activities, “putting students at the center of instruction” (Udvari, 2018) to “afford students agency for their learning” (Lombardi and Shipley, 2021). Felipe is passionate about sharing the culture, history, language, and literatures of Spain and Latin America; he enjoys witnessing his students connecting it with their own unique intersectional identities, values, and skills.
Felipe’s teaching experience has equipped him with multiple teaching strategies to spark students’ imagination and curiosity. He works hard to foster meaningful classroom environments in which students can learn content in multimodal ways and engage in higher order thinking. Facilitating a fun and inclusive environment enables students to be more confident and active in their learning, allowing more participation, peer collaboration, and stronger student interactions.
Congratulations, Felipe!