Megan Irene-Teresa Mastro

Megan Mastro is a current doctoral candidate and Teaching Assistant (T.A.) at ASU Tempe Campus. She obtained her Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in Psychology at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio where she also earned minor degrees in Spanish and Sociology. After finishing her undergraduate studies, Ms. Mastro worked as an elementary school teacher at Horizon Education Center, a non-profit organization, and later moved to Madrid, Spain to work as an English Language Assistant (Auxiliar de conversación) where she earned a TEFL certificate for Teaching English as a Foreign Language. In Fall 2018, Megan moved back to her hometown in Cleveland, Ohio to begin a Master of Arts (M.A.) in Spanish program as graduate assistant at Cleveland State University. She graduated her M.A. with a concentration in Spanish Linguistics and a graduate certificate in TESOL. 

Professionally, Ms. Mastro travels around the country to giving talks and sharing her Pro-life testimony to advocate for the well-being of women and families. She currently teaches beginning level Spanish at ASU while studying Sociolinguistics in the Spanish Linguistics Ph.D. program. Her research interests include Catholic Mexican-American family harmony, specifically honing in on the ways that Catholic bilingual parents pass on Spanish to their children by means of Catholic family faith practices in and outside the home. 

As an interdisciplinary scholar and Catholic family researcher, Megan combines the fields of Psychology, Sociolinguistics, Heritage Language Acquisition, and Religiosity (Christianity) in order to shine light on the importance of family harmony, empathy, vulnerability, group-belonging, and individual well-being as key factors to consider when discussing Spanish language maintenance. Megan wishes to use her doctoral degree to serve the Catholic Latino/Hispanic American community to promote Spanish Maintenance in the US by means of Holy family life.