Place is highly connected with outdoor education; it is defined by the location of the learning process and it designates both practically and theoretically ways to foster to students a strong bond with natural places. Place attachment refers to this bond or, in other words, the love relationship, one can develop with a place. This research tries to investigate if there is a causal relationship between outdoor education and development of place attachment. A quasi-experimental design research was conducted to 31 teenagers, 12-13 years old. A questionnaire, for measuring the level of place attachment to the natural surroundings of their school, was distributed at two different timelines. Four different dimensions of place attachment were measured; place identity, place dependence, social bonding and nature bonding. The experimental group participated in the program “Attachment to my Local Natural Landscape”, which was developed especially for this study and promoted direct connection with the land, through outdoor activities. The control group received no intervention. The results demonstrated that the program influenced only the female participants of the experimental group. No significant differences were indicated between the two groups after the implementation of the program. The small sample and the short length program implemented were important limitations of this study, which demand further future research to extract more clear results.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:liu-98740 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Katsamagka, Argyro |
| Publisher | Linköpings universitet, Institutionen för kultur och kommunikation |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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