Childhood and Youth Studies Minor
The Undergraduate Minor in Childhood and Youth Studies engages students in the study of childhood across time, space, and disciplinary perspectives. The subject of childhood is inherently interdisciplinary, navigating fluidly across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, and with practical applications in education, society, and a variety of future careers for students, as well as in students’ own past, future, and personal lives.
To understand childhood and youth, and thereby better understand the human being and humanity by examining its formative stage, one must examine not only children’s literature, media, and culture, but also the history, sociology, and anthropology of childhood. Understanding human development is deepened by an understanding of developmental psychology, cognitive development, and language acquisition. A wide variety of disciplinary approaches thus provide important avenues for understanding how we become what we are.
What does the Childhood and Youth Studies Minor involve?
The Minor includes a prerequisite course offering an introduction to childhood studies, a core course on children’s literature, and variety of elective courses leveraging the interdisciplinary strength of UCSB faculty with expertise related to childhood and youth studies across 18 Departments and all 3 Divisions of the College of Letters and Science.
Course offerings are both local and global in scope, with many reflecting comparative approaches that explore other world regions in depth. Students who pursue the minor will obtain a rich and multidimensional understanding of childhood and youth through their interactions with faculty from diverse disciplines.
Students will have the opportunity to question past assumptions, develop their understanding, cultivate analytical and research skills, and engage meaningfully with childhood and youth studies through interdisciplinary coursework and a reflective capstone course, project, or internship experience working with actual children or young people.
The internship option will deepen and inform their understanding of young people’s own agency and voice, whether in the local community or via national or international options. Such experiences will provide students with hands-on experience, practical training, and direct exposure to post-graduate career opportunities related to children and youth. Students also will be able to participate in a variety of extracurricular offerings sponsored by UCSB’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center Childhood and Youth Studies Research Focus Group.
Why Minor in Childhood and Youth Studies?
The Minor is positioned at the forefront of the burgeoning academic field of childhood and youth studies, which forges new interconnections between disciplines to interrogate a deeply familiar and yet also elusive object of inquiry. Across a variety of fields childhood studies has sought to correct the longstanding historical neglect of childhood and overcome the subject’s unique research challenges through innovative methods. Students minoring in Childhood and Youth Studies will learn critical perspectives, new frameworks, and novel concepts that scholars use to address the complexities surrounding this group. Acquiring such knowledge will help students navigate contemporary issues, design better public policies, and make ethically informed determinations that consider the unique needs of and impacts upon this highly vulnerable population.
What can I do with a Childhood and Youth Studies Minor?
Professionally, the Minor in Childhood and Youth Studies will prepare students for life and a wide variety of careers that will remain significant and demand human expertise and interpersonal skills as long as there are children. This innovative Minor offers students a solid foundation on which to build a rewarding career in education, medicine, law, academia, research, policy, or public advocacy, as well as a wide range of specific career opportunities related to children and youth. The Minor also will prepare students to pursue further credentials, research, and advanced study through graduate education. The need is urgent for informed policymakers to shape the future by recognizing the impact of present-day practices and policies on children, one of the most vulnerable populations in any country, and to acknowledge the voice, agency, rights, and views of children and youth.
Learning objectives of the Minor in Childhood and Youth Studies
Students who complete the Minor in Childhood and Youth Studies will be able to demonstrate:
- Comprehensive and interdisciplinary understanding of childhood and youth studies in historical and global contexts
- Knowledge of diverse disciplinary methods, concepts, and analytical tools for analyzing children and youth
- An understanding that childhood and youth are not timeless and universal, and that the meanings and experiences of childhood and youth have varied dramatically across time and space
- Broad knowledge of how conceptions of childhood and youth have shaped social, cultural, and institutional practices, including notions of rights and juvenile justice
- An understanding of children’s roles as historical actors and agents of change, including the ways they have contested adult conceptions of childhood and youth and adult prescriptions for proper behavior
- Critical analytical skills to engage in debates around childhood and youth and to assess past and current approaches to childhood and youth studies
- Written and oral communication skills to present information effectively to both academic and public audiences
- Ability to question assumptions and examine issues through layered analysis
- Practical skills gained through different disciplinary approaches and an internship experience or capstone project
- Awareness of ethical dimensions surrounding power dynamics among children and the adult actors and institutions who guide, regulate, and police the behavior of children and youth
Minor Requirement Sheet
Childhood and Youth Studies Advisory Board
Sara Pankenier Weld, Professor, Germanic & Slavic Studies, Comparative Literature (Board Chair)
Peter Bloom, Professor, Film & Media Studies, Comparative Literature
Sabine Frühstück, Distinguished Professor, East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies
Lina Hou, Associate Professor, Linguistics
Lisa Jacobson, Professor, History
Dominique Jullien, Distinguished Professor, French and Italian, Comparative Literature
Maryam Kia-Keating, Professor Emerita, Counseling, Clinical & School Psychology
Victor Rios, Professor and MacArthur Chair, Sociology
René Weber, Professor, Psychological & Brain Sciences, Communication