Experiencing Beach in Australia: Study Abroad Students' Perspectives

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 neocolonialism, 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 awareness, an embodied dialectic descriptive interpretation of place experience is suggested.