Hello! My name is Mia Naccarato, and I am a third-year student pursuing a major in English Writing, a minor in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, and a certificate in Children’s Literature. I am very excited to be a part of the Chancellor’s Undergraduate Teaching Fellowship this semester!
A little bit about me: I love to read and write creatively in my free time! My current genres of choice are science fiction and young adult literature, and I love sitting on the couch with my cat, Sass, and reading. I was born and raised here in Pittsburgh, and it has been great to get to know my home city even better these last few years that I have been at Pitt!
For this semester, I will be instructing a unit entitled “Autism Representation in Adolescent Literature” for the “Representing Adolescence” course taught by Dr. Jesse Jack through the English program. “Representing Adolescence” is a course that focuses on literature for teens and young adults, and one of the missions of the course is to foster representation for a diverse audience. Everyone deserves to see themselves reflected in the books that they read, and this course aims to showcase the wide variety of work and theory that supports diverse pedagogical practices. This is the foundation for the “Autism Representation” unit, too. As an autistic person myself, I found that growing up, there were not a whole lot of titles that represented this experience. Fortunately, now there is a larger body of work representing autistic experiences, but there is still a long way to go. My goal through this unit is to highlight stories portraying autistic characters and illuminate how important these narratives are to young readers. Given that “Representing Adolescence” is a course dedicated to teaching about the wide range of experiences portrayed in narratives for adolescents, I believe that this topic will fit in well with the course and benefit students by providing a different perspective than what they might be used to. It is important that neurodiverse folks feel recognized in the classroom space, but it is also beneficial for all students to learn about different experiences and perspectives.
In the future, I hope to become an educator. I plan on getting a graduate degree in teaching, and my goal is to teach English at the secondary level. Participating in CUTF will allow me to fully research, plan, implement, and instruct material in the classroom, and I have learned so much already as I have embarked on the process of selecting sources to read and presentations to give in class. When it comes to a field like education, getting real-world experience is helpful and necessary to be a more informed and well-rounded educator. On top of getting this invaluable experience, I am also able to dive more into a subject that I am passionate about, and having the opportunity to share this interest with students is very rewarding!
I look forward to this semester, and I am very excited to be a part of CUTF! Nice to meet you all!