Dr. María Luisa Parra is a Senior Preceptor in Romance Languages and Literatures and teaches MPES engaged scholarship courses including “Spanish 59: Spanish and the Community” and “Spanish 59H: Spanish for Latino Students II: Connecting with Communities,” in which students work directly with Latinx communities and organizations in the Boston area. She was voted one of the Class of 2022’s favorite professors.
“In my teaching, I like to think about how to design opportunities for students to learn, reflect, question, and also discover their own creativity and potential with the language. It is a process of understanding what I need to do or bring in order for students to start developing questions about language and their relationship with it,” Parra-Velasco said. “I consider myself more of a facilitator in the classroom. Why are we thinking about Spanish this way? Why do we feel this way about Spanish? I try to bring these questions out of them so we can co-build knowledge in the classroom and learn from each other.”