Positive Youth Development

Highlights

• Positive youth development is an assets-based approach for cultivating competencies essential to personal well-being.
• When environmental education enables children and youth to contribute to improving urban environments, it can not only increase cities’ sustainability and resilience but also foster young people’s personal growth.
• Participatory action research, peer education, and youth civic engagement are three educational approaches that can lead to positive change for both urban environments and youth living within them.

Introduction

Environmental education is often associated with environmental learning and pro-environmental behaviors. Some approaches to environmental education, however, also enable young people’s personal growth through the development of confidence, self-efficacy, and other assets that support an individual’s well-being. This essay explores the intersection of urban environmental education and positive youth development. It can inform teachers, environmental educators, science educators, youth workers, and others who want to advance environmental learning and a positive developmental trajectory for young people in varied educational settings, such as school classrooms, after-school programs, community organizations, youth development organizations, churches, camps, nature centers, science centers, museums, and gardens.

We begin by defining positive youth development and applying it to environmental education. We then describe three programs from the U.S. and Australia to illustrate different pedagogies for integrating positive youth development in environmental education aimed at urban sustainability. By “youth,” we refer to the transitional period between childhood and adulthood, which varies across cultures. The United Nations defines youth as individuals age 15-24; however, others include children younger than 15 or young adults older than 24 in their definitions. The programs we describe also included some children younger than 15.