Youth Participation to Solve Relevant, Real-World Sustainability Challenges Using Create2Solve DIY STEAM Kits: My Reflexive Account

Young people have the potential to be an investment in their communities, potentially leading solutions to wicked sustainability challenges in developing countries. Still, extant literature highlights that youth of color from low-income neighborhoods are: a) greatly excluded from sustainable development initiatives, and/or b) engaged in learning content that is irrelevant to them. Such deficit-based, tokenistic and alienated learning activities constrict youth engagement and participation, particularly in innovative 21st century learning paradigms, such as science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics (STEAM) education. In this paper, I present ‘Create2Solve do-it-yourself (DIY) STEAM Kits’, a project developed in collaboration with a non-profit school in at-risk community. The Project is a community- and learner-relevant project which adopts an asset-based, non-tokenistic lens to view and position young people as civic citizens who are both capable and motivated to ‘do STEAM’ for community transformation. Particularly, I offer a reflexive account of my experience of designing and implementing Create2Solve Kits as I worked closely with youth. Towards the end, I present an evaluation of key takeaways learned from my experiences of facilitating this process. Through my reflective analysis, I propose that youth are keen to participate in sustainable development projects, provided that such projects: a) position them as capable and resourceful citizens; b) remain relevant to their local community contexts while helping them improve understanding of complex STEAM concepts; c) allow them to substantially contribute to their personal, community, and societal transformation; and d) foster non-tokenistic participation where their input and decisions drive the work.