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Experiencing Beach in Australia: Study Abroad Students' Perspectives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 March 2012

Yoshifumi Nakagawa  and
Phillip G. Payne
Yoshifumi Nakagawa*
Affiliation:
Monash University
Phillip G. Payne
Affiliation:
Monash University
*
†Address for correspondence: Yoshifumi Nakagawa. Email: yoshifumi.nakagawa@monash.edu
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Abstract

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 fuidity. 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 fnds that the beach experience is infuenced by various social discourses, such as neocolonialism, individualism and mobility. Participants experienced the beach in a fuid 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 awareness, an embodied dialectic descriptive interpretation of place experience is suggested.

Keywords

place-responsive outdoor environmental educationexperiential learningstudy abroad studentsbeachbelongingmobility
Type
Feature Articles
Information
Australian Journal of Environmental Education , Volume 27 , Issue 1: Special Issue: The “ness” of Environmental Education , 2011 , pp. 94 - 108
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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