Diana Arya welcomes the crowd to the 2019 Curie-osity Project Showcase (a precursor to Youth Summit 2020)
Due to the Coronavirus, the Youth Summit has been postponed.
A book table with authors signing. The walls crowded with poster presentations, as researchers offer their latest findings. A virtual reality station. The center of the room full with round tables, some featuring discussion groups, others offering demos of projects. Hundreds of academics buzzing about, thoughtfully engaging with what it means to live sustainably on a changing planet.
How is this different than any other conference? Approximately 500 children and their families living in Santa Barbara County will be taking part in Youth Summit 2020, scheduled for May 27th in UCSB’s Corwin Pavilion. The event is the brainchild of Dr. Diana Arya, Assistant Professor in Education, and her colleague Dr. Betsy Brenner, Professor in Education, along with the Community Based Literacies team of graduate and undergraduate students. Through a seed grant opportunity from UCOP’s UC Links Program, the idea of the summit emerged from CBL team discussions that highlighted a growing interest in showcasing the important work that children across multiple CBL programs were doing.
By participating in programs such as the Curie-osity Project and LEAFY, children have co-authored and published books about overlooked work of underrepresented individuals in STEM and have transformed community spaces designed to protect local plant and animal species. Arya explains that her team developed the summit idea by asking, “What are our youths’ concerns? Interests? What are they learning and creating?” She says, “All responses from participating youth and undergraduate facilitators suggested an environmental theme.”
An ambitious program like this one is a natural outgrowth from the work Arya has led over the past five years. The Curie-osity Project (named in honor of Marie Curie) is a partnership with Girls Inc. that led to the publication of STEMinists: The Lifework of 12 Women Scientists and Engineers (Xóchitl Justice Press), a student-written book about UCSB women researchers. The currently in progress Young Authorship project, involving students at the Harding University Partnership School, will produce a book that contains poetic, fictional, and journalistic pieces about living in the maritime community of Santa Barbara. Arya is also the faculty director of the McEnroe Reading & Language Arts Clinic, where children in grades 1 through 8 receive intensive, research-based instruction in skills and practices related to literacy development that include fluency, reading comprehension, and various forms and modalities of writing and presenting across the content areas with a particular focus on STEM-related disciplines.
Children will be invited through the Gevirtz School’s partnering institutions (including Harding Elementary) to participate in the Youth Summit, which will be a Spanish/English bilingual conference; children can submit proposals for sharing their research or DIY/innovation projects during this event. “We have received enthusiastic responses from partnering site leaders, UCSB faculty and department leaders, and graduate students about the Youth Summit,” Arya says. She also points out the organizational skills of the Department of Education graduate student and Youth Summit Lead Coordinator Faith Hyun as crucial. “Such an endeavor will go far in building the capacity for supporting the university-community partnership goal of strengthening the K-to-20 pipeline for our local youth.”
Some of the leadership for the event comes from the teen participants, many of whom have been part of Arya’s community-based projects from the beginning. “This is for kids, by kids,” Arya insists. “We’re backseat driving a bit, but the teens have amazing skills they are demonstrating so far.”
Arya prefers to talk in a first-person plural that’s not a royal-We but honest inclusivity. “It’s just part of my discourse,” she explains.” I don’t see myself as owning anything related to the school. I lead by letting people build upon my initial ideas and goals. That’s what a visionary does—provides visions of the endgame but how we get there is up to all of us.”
Which doesn’t stop Arya from obsessing over details like the ever-present goal of fundraising, to bus transportation for students and their families, or even a contest for a student-designed logo for Youth Summit 2020. “This is a tradition we’re creating,” she says, “so it’s in our interest to establish a sustainable way to do it.”