Claudia Alfaro’s first career path was architecture. Now, rather than designing buildings, she helps her students construct new language skills as she teaches seventh- and eighth-graders Spanish at Holy Trinity School’s St. Matthews campus, 423 Cherrywood Road.
This fall, Alfaro was honored as the “2024 Outstanding Spanish Teacher of the Year” by the Kentucky Chapter of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese and the Kentucky World Languages Association.
Alfaro began her teaching career 26 years ago, teaching English in Mexico, her home country. In 2009, she moved to Louisville — which she lovingly calls her “second home” — but only landed at Holy Trinity School six years ago.
As a Catholic, Alfaro said, she loves the opportunity to connect her faith with her work. In the classroom, she teaches her students how to pray in Spanish and incorporates the saints into her lessons.
“Everything the school is doing with faith, I incorporate in my class,” she said.
One of her goals as a Spanish teacher is to share Hispanic culture — which she described as intimately connected to Catholicism.
“I like to share our feasts, like Our Lady of Guadalupe,” she said. Last year, she taught her classes a traditional Spanish song to Our Lady for the Dec. 12 feast day. “I like to be involved in the Hispanic community and share that with my students.”
Learning a language is more than memorizing rules or learning how to conjugate verbs, she noted. She seeks to build upon what they already know as she uses words and phrases at, or slightly above, the students’ skill levels.
Speaking Spanish becomes accessible to the students as they move from simple phrases to more complex thoughts as they’re exposed to the language, she said.
Alfaro also makes collaboration with other language teachers a priority, she noted. She founded and leads a group called “Todos somos coleges” — ‘We are colleagues” — composed of more than a dozen language teachers from the Archdiocese of Louisville’s Catholic Schools.
Language teachers can lack resources, she noted, and she sees a solution in teachers helping teachers. “Why don’t we share?” she asked.
When teachers work together, she said, “We can succeed together.”
Meeting several times a year, the language teachers share what is working in their classrooms, as well as opportunities for language-specific professional development, such as workshops and conferences.
Following in the footsteps of her father, who was a teacher, Alfaro said she finds purpose in her career.
“He would come home with energy from his students,” she said. “Now, with my students, I feel the same thing. I love my students.”
