ABOUT
The Story Behind The Summit By Smaranda Lawrie
In the Spring, when the pandemic first hit hard, racial tensions escalated, and we moved to remote learning, I was a teaching assistant for an advanced lab class in the Psychology department. As I got to know students better, and we had more and more discussions about what was going on around us, I increasingly came to realize that students were really struggling to stay happy, healthy, and optimistic in the face of everything going on. At the same time, I was teaching a class in Positive Psychology at Westmont College and students in this class seemed to really be enjoying and benefitting from the different Positive Psychology Interventions I was assigning as part of their homework and in-class activities. I decided to infuse a bit of Positive Psychology into my section for Advanced Experimental Social Psychology at UCSB too. We began each section with a short “Three Good Things” exercise. At the beginning of class, we all took a couple of minutes to write down 2-3 good things that happened to each of us in the past 24 hours. This simple activity takes only a couple of minutes, but sets the tone for a positive learning environment. Over the course of a few months, it teaches students to notice the good in their lives and helps them develop more optimistic thinking.
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The past two decades of rigorous empirical research in the field of Positive Psychology has found that skills that increase well-being and related factors such as resilience, positive emotions, engagement, and meaning can be taught in parallel to academic material. Rather than lowering students’ achievements by diverting time away from academic subjects, positive education activities and well-being interventions contribute to academic achievement.
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The students in the section seemed to enjoy and benefit from engaging in these activities. By the end of the quarter, several students had reached out to ask for more. It is these students that inspired this entire program. I wanted to find a way to make this material and these interventions more widely available to the broader UCSB community because I saw first-hand how beneficial they were in both my students’ lives and my own life.
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Samantha Blodgett, a Psychological and Brain Sciences and Communication double major, now in her senior year at UCSB, was one of the students in the section who initially reached out in the Spring. We were able to reconnect this Summer and brainstorm some ideas for the Summit. She has been along for the ride, a partner in this project, helping me create this series from day 1! And I could not have done it without her! Initially, we were thinking about something much smaller. . . . just a short lecture series from some of the amazing graduate students and professors on campus. We couldn’t have imagined then how big the program would get and how many incredible speakers from both on and off campus that we would be able to recruit.