Sacramento Area Youth Speaks (SAYS) is a program within the UC
Davis School of Education CRESS Center that engages, educates,
and empowers students, poet-mentor educators, and teachers in a
collaborative, innovative partnership both within and beyond the
walls of school.
SAYS Program
At SAYS, writing is a transformative, autobiographical, and
transformative tool that enables participants to critically
reflect upon and read the world around them. In this vein,
literacy and learning are alive in the lives of those we teach.
Evidence obtained from research on SAYS is showing that when
students and teachers participate in this critical literacy
pedagogy together, we can not only improve literacy skills, but
also change the way students and teachers relate to one another.
Excerpt from “Sacramento Area Youth Speaks (And the World
Listens)”
One day in high school, while on a field trip to Sac State for an
African-American student leadership conference [Dre-T] stumbled
upon a Sacramento Area Youth Speaks workshop. He was immediately
hooked.
As the group of teens shouted their poems from every corner of
the room in a guerilla poetry spectacle called Griots (which are
an ancient West African tradition that S.A.Y.S has adopted)
Tillman was captivated. “I’d always been hungry for knowledge,”
he explained, “S.A.Y.S had the food for the thought I was
starving for and they knew I was hungry.”
4th Annual Summit – “Know Your Writes: Continuing the Legacy”
Join the SAYS team as they welcome up to 800 middle and high
school youth to campus for a day of poetry and empowerment. In
the evening, attend the SAYS Regional Poetry Slam competition.
The winners will move on to compete in the international Brave
New Voices competition.
