Educational experiences of post-critical non-place

Abstract

This ethnographic small-scale interpretive study investigates four international Study Abroad (SA) students’ mobile experiences of local coastal/beach sites, as part of a semester-long undergraduate outdoor environmental education unit ‘Experiencing the Australian Landscape’ (EAL) offered at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Their individual and collective experiences of the coast in EAL highlighted the problematic status of uncritically assuming and accepting place pedagogy in education practices. With a specific focus on the lived time experience of the four SA students, this study examined how the participants negotiated their meanings of the Australian landscape over the limited duration of the EAL unit. Three temporal themes related to non-place experience were identified: transitory; creative; and re-normalising. In discussing these findings, we recommend that any (eco)pedagogical conceptualisation, practice, and research of ‘place’ needs to attend empirically and theoretically to the non-placeness of the body-time-space-relation and their increasing abstraction within globalising processes.