Empowering Youth to Engage in Social Discourse Through Place-Based Songwriting

Abstract

This article represents the authors’ place-based songwriting work with youth aged 9 years to 18 years who were participating in two of West Virginia’s 4-H summer camp experiences. Beginning with the simple exercise of having the youth brainstorm and list their likes and dislikes about the communities in which they live, the author adapted an approach for teaching traditional music in West Virginia—the call and response—to create a framework by which the youth could turn their likes/dislike statements into lyrics, ultimately performing their songs for an audience of their peers and the leadership of their respective camps. The goal of the project was to test the methodology and to set the stage for the development of a curriculum module that could be used in schools as a way to engage students in creative and productive conversations about the past, present, and future of their communities. Not only did the youth readily engage in the process, they provided thoughtful and thought-provoking lyrical representations of what they saw as both positive and negative about their communities.