Poetic Perspective, Critical Insight: A Study of Youth Attitudes Toward Place and Community
Soul of Society: A Focus on the Lives of Children & Youth
ISBN: 978-1-78441-060-5, eISBN: 978-1-78441-059-9
Publication date: 25 September 2014
Abstract
Purpose
To provide insight into young people’s attitudes toward community, place, and public discourse on youth and the environment, and to constructively situate the concept of “a sense of place” within these insights for critical pedagogy and community development.
Design/methodology/approach
This project utilizes a grounded theory approach to identify salient themes in young people’s expressions of place relationships through poetry. About 677 poems about “local watersheds” written by youth aged 5–18 for the River of Words Poetry Contest between 1996 and 2009 are analyzed using poetic and content analysis.
Findings
Findings include the importance of place experiences that employ risk-taking and play, engage central family relationships, and provide access to historical and political narratives of place for the development of constructive place relationships. We also present findings regarding emotions in the sample, showing changing levels of hope and idealism, sadness, pessimism, and other emotions as expressed in the poems.
Research limitations/implications
Using poetic analysis to study attitudes, values, and feelings is a promising method for learning more about the perceptions and values of individuals that affect their self-efficacy and agency.
Practical and social implications
Engaging youth as active participants and empathetic knowledge-creators in their own places offers one opportunity for critical reflective development in order to combat and reframe disempowering public discourses about young people and their relationships to nature and community. Educators can use this research to adapt contextually and emotionally rooted methods of place-based learning with their students.
Original/value
The paper uses a nontraditional, mixed methods approach to research and a unique body of affective data. It makes a strong argument for reflective, experiential, and critical approaches to learning about nature and society issues in local contexts.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the poets who have submitted their work to the River of Words contest and especially those whose pieces are shared here. Much gratitude also to Pamela Michael, Robert Hass, Susan Sarratt, Louisa Michaels, and the River of Words organization, whose hard work and joyful encouragement of this research made it possible.
Citation
La Rochelle, M. and Owens, P.E. (2014), "Poetic Perspective, Critical Insight: A Study of Youth Attitudes Toward Place and Community", Soul of Society: A Focus on the Lives of Children & Youth (Sociological Studies of Children and Youth, Vol. 18), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 27-62. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1537-466120140000018013
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2014 Emerald Group Publishing Limited