ERIC Number: EJ937134
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2011
Pages: 15
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0814-0626
EISSN: N/A
Experiencing Beach in Australia: Study Abroad Students' Perspectives
Nakagawa, Yoshifumi; Payne, Phillip G.
Australian Journal of Environmental Education, v27 n1 p94-108 2011
The current "Australian-"ness"" of outdoor environmental education is an evolving "set" of socio-cultural constructions. These constructions can be interpreted within the circumstances of an empirical study of tertiary study abroad students' participation in an undergraduate semester long unit "Experiencing the Australian Landscape" (EAL) as an ambivalent mixture of belonging and beach, or solidity and fluidity. This ambivalence imparts various meanings within and about the Australian context of beach as a "place". The study is based on an interpretive mixed method ethnographic and phenomenological small-scale case study. It finds that the beach experience is influenced by various social discourses, such as neo-colonialism, individualism and mobility. Participants experienced the beach in a fluid sense of non-belonging, despite the EAL intention of fostering a place-responsive pedagogy. In order to understand their experience and its alleged link to an enhanced environmental aware"ness", an embodied dialectic descriptive interpretation of place experience is suggested.
Descriptors: Environmental Education, Foreign Countries, Study Abroad, Student Attitudes, Outdoor Education, Identification (Psychology), Participant Satisfaction, Student Experience
Australian Association for Environmental Education, Inc. P.O. Box 560, Bellingen, NSW 2454, Australia. Tel: +61-2-6655-1865; Fax: +61-2-6655-1596; e-mail: admin@aaee.org.au; Web site: http://www.aaee.org.au/publications/ajee.htm
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: Elementary Secondary Education; Higher Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Australia
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A