Młodzież – tożsamość – środowisko – casus Śląska Cieszyńskiego
Youth – identity – environment – the case of Cieszyn Silesia

Summary/Abstract: The narrative presented in this article is situated within pedagogy of youth, in the mainstream of discus- sion on youth as the subject of prospective changes, in social pedagogy and intercultural pedagogy. The theoretical framework of the considerations is constructivism and its basic thesis that identity is constructed in the process of primary and secondary socialization.The author refers to the research material, collected over thirty years on forming the identity of young people living in Cieszyn Silesia and the determinants of this process. The scheme of comparative longitudinal studies, the sequential research strategy, and oblique, quantitative research were used. The results of the aforementioned studies on young people carried out in 1990-2022 are a record of social and civilization changes that have affected the community of Cieszyn Silesia, it is also a record of the current state.The outcomes of the presented research indicate undulating views and declarations of youth in terms of identification. They provide grounds for supposing that contemporary youth from Cieszyn Silesia declare and feel a multidimensional identity (harmoniously combining the local, national, European and global dimensions) much more clearly than their older peers. Obviously, the above presented proposal of an empirical theorem should be treated in the categories of a (very initially) verified hypothesis, requiring reliable representative longitudinal comparative studies at various borderlands (to determine whether the stated regularities are of general value), as well as nationwide studies.The obtained result allows for assuming that the examined young people can cope better in the future (e.g. on the labour market), can enter interpersonal relations with bigger sensitivity, can consciously (re)construct the local environment, country and the world, and can responsibly handle their activities and their consequences.

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