Fostering local patriotism among Omsk schoolchildren in an educational environment

Abstract

This article brings into focus youth outflow from a region with extensive migration flows, presenting local patriotism as a deterrent based on the assessment of urban identity and commitment to the city. The latter — the central concept of our study — is a special form of a person’s value-based attitude to one’s place of residence, characterized by loyalty, a desire to stay in the city, emotional disposition and identification with it, involvement in the city life and a desire to fulfil one’s potential in it. Objective: to offer targeted prevention of migration attitudes in schoolchildren by introducing original game practices into the learning process in order to build a positive identity and commitment to the city as components of local patriotism. Methods: organizational methods, such as formative experiment (February–May 2025); empirical methods, or testing (methods of assessing commitment to the city by Yu. V. Potapova, A. Yu. Malenova and A. A. Malenov; identity with the city by S. A. Litvina and O. I. Muravyova); questionnaires (collection of data on the sample and feedback); and statistical methods: primary descriptive statistics, Student’s t-test and Fisher’s φ-test. The sample comprised 65 ninth-graders (52% girls and 48% boys with the average age of 15 years) from one of the schools in Omsk: EG1 (4 classes) — 24 people, EG2 (6 classes) — 15 people and EG3 (8 classes) — 26 people. The initial stage showed no statistically significant differences between students of different groups in terms of the structure and level of commitment to the city and identity: there are high and average indicators with the dominance of the scales of identification, loyalty, attachment, belonging and assessment of the uniqueness of the city over involvement, personal contribution and planning the future in it. Psychological and pedagogical influences revealed trends towards stronger latter indicators while maintaining the former ones, which is more typical of the group with a large number of classes. The results confirm that the introduction of innovative science-based educational practices with a psychological component creates a certain educational environment aimed at fostering young students’ value-based attitude to their current place of residence, an active subjective position in relation to their region and stronger local patriotism.