Poet Mentor Educator

UC Davis SAYS (Sacramento Area Youth Speaks) K-12 Teaching Artists also known as Poet-Mentor Educators are students, scholars, and/or artists from the community with various economic, social, and educational backgrounds, who teach, inform and integrate their skill sets, art forms, perspectives, knowledge and skills into the classroom to enhance literacy and empower youth. Scholar-Mentor Educators share a passion for art, social justice and education as well as a deep commitment to teaching disadvantaged youth. SAYS Teaching Artists work within schools, after school programs, and community agencies.

SAYS Poet Mentor Educators engage in a variety of duties and task to help support the transformation of schools and support young people to become the authors of their own lives and agents of change: 

• Provide direct service to K-12 students across multiple school districts and school systems, in and around the Sacramento region.
• Execute school and community programming and work in collaboration with the university, the schools and community to support students academic achievement and exposure + access to higher education.
• Support for project development, curriculum design and instruction, student engagement, workshop facilitation, and presentations in community and on campus that promotes educational opportunities for student groups that have been historically underserved and underrepresented in higher education and the workforce.
• Ability to commute to SAYS Center in Sacramento at 950 Fulton Ave Sacramento, CA 95825.
• Ability to commute and travel to various K-12 sites throughout the greater Sacramento area.
• Ability to stand, walk, facilitate and engage students at SAYS school and community programming sites.
• Use computer equipment for extended periods.
• Possession of a valid California Driver's License.
• Participate in DMV Pull-Notice.
• Position is a mandatory reporter for known or suspected child abuse and requires that a statement acknowledging the requirement to report child abuse is signed.
• Work flexible hours, including occasion weekends to meet programmatic needs.
• Provide own transportation for frequent work-related travel.
• Proficiency in speaking, reading, and writing in English.
• Students who speak, read and write in a language such as Spanish, Russian, Ukrainian, Farsi, Pashto, Arabic, etc., are greatly welcomed and encouraged to apply to work with SAYS.
• Passionate commitment to working with children of all backgrounds
• Demonstrates cultural competence, sensitivity to and understanding of the diverse academic, socioeconomic, cultural, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, and ethnic backgrounds of our program participants and fellow colleagues