An analysis of youth poems from river of words: Environmental identity, education, and youth development

This study explores the use of poetry as a tool for understanding the dynamic, nuanced, and highly political representation of youth place experience. I suggest that the story-oriented and constructive practice of place-based poetry facilitates the development of personal engagement with environmental values, attitudes, and meanings, and leads to empowered place identities among a sample of American youth. Further, I argue that more, and new models of place-based education are needed to combat disempowering public discourse around youth and the environment, and the traditional modes of environmental education that fail to provide youth with the tools to constructively challenge it.;This project utilizes a grounded theory approach to identify and analyze young people's expressions of place identity through poetry. 677 poems about "watersheds" are analyzed that have been written by over 600 young people between the ages of five and nineteen. The poems were selected as finalists for the River of Words Environmental Arts and Poetry Contest between the years of 1996 and 2009. I analyzed the content of the poems to discover what environmental subjects were expressed by youth poets, and what was meaningful about them for youth identifications with place.;Findings include the increased valuing of family and human relationships in environmental experiences as youth grow from grades K-2 to 10-12; the local environment as a key site for independent growth through risk taking for K-6 youth in the sample; a relative decline in emotions of hope and idealism in regard to the environment as youth get older, coupled with a relative increase in sadness and iv pessimism; and the emergence of apathy and cynicism in poems written by youth in grades 10-12.These findings suggest that developing constructive, place-based environmental identity, which I argue will facilitate stronger environmental stewardship in the future, hinges on the personal and critical engagement of young people with local environments in ways that allow them to create knowledge about their places, and engage in their environments in active, participatory ways.